Streetsblog Chicago

Condo board president David Lewis indicates the height and proximity of a ramp.

The residents of 400 S Green Street, the building where the Illinois Department of Transportation plans to build a new highway ramp just a few feet away, have begun a petition to rally neighbors in opposition to the project.

The proposed flyover is part of IDOT’s $400 million Circle Interchange expansion, a project that the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s myriad committees allowed onto the funding list for the GO TO 2040 regional plan, even though it conflicts with the plan’s commitments to transit, livability, and sustainability.

IDOT’s “preferred alternative” for the project, known as Alternative 7.1C, calls for building a highway ramp next to 400 S Green, while a different variation, which IDOT rejected in mysterious fashion, would avoid building the new ramp.

Asserting that “the inclusion of the flyovers in an urban environment divides communities, creates unsafe viaducts, and increases noise and pollution,” the petition lists the many reasons people tend to not want flyovers or highway ramps outside their windows. For example:

Overpass structures create a darker and dirtier environment. Threatening to pedestrians. This ramp will also be located outside the Halsted Street Blue Line station where people need to wait for buses and enter/exit the station.

Some signers are leaving comments about how Alternative 7.1C would affect Chicagoans:

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95th Street through Oak Lawn is a typical suburban arterial: very wide, with high-speed traffic. Photo: Oak Lawn Public Library.

A recent decision by Illinois’s 1st District Court of Appeals could make it harder to hold city governments and individual drivers accountable for pedestrian safety.

The ruling by Justice Sheldon Harris [PDF] concerns a case in a which pedestrian was struck and killed by a driver on 95th Street in Oak Lawn. By creating a new legal precedent with a restrictive view of people’s right to walk in unmarked crosswalks, the ruling could have serious implications for pedestrian safety in the eyes of the law.

On November 9, 2009, Joan Orth, 51, was crossing 95th Street at Kenton Avenue at around 5:45 p.m. in the Village of Oak Lawn. Before she could get to the other side of the street, a driver struck and killed her. Diane Dunet, Orth’s estate administrator, filed lawsuits against Oak Lawn as well as ComEd because nearby streetlights weren’t working at the time.

The village and ComEd denied responsibility and the case was thrown out. Oak Lawn said it didn’t owe anything, arguing that Orth “was not an intended and permitted user of the street where the accident occurred” because there was no marked crosswalk, according to the ruling. The village government also argued that the darkened street lights didn’t cause the crash but “presented an opportunity” for it, adding that the crash was the fault of the driver of the vehicle who struck Orth, for which Oak Lawn could not be held liable.

A look at a satellite image of the intersection taken on November 23, 2009 (see map below), confirms there is an unmarked crosswalk across 95th Street, which has six travel lanes and two parking lanes. Orth was struck in a westbound lane, near the center of the street. Attorneys say that Flanagan’s ruling sets a precedent that could weaken the legal protections for everyone using unmarked crosswalks in Cook County.

This case is a little hard to wrap your head around, but the important precedent hinges on the following three concepts that attorney Jim Freeman helpfully explained:

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At an April 3 public hearing, IDOT showed a version of Alternative 15.4 -- the option that doesn't include a noisy, blighting flyover above Halsted Street -- with six lanes, and ruled out building it. Previously this option called for five lanes at this location (see map below) and the agency had said it would consider building it.

In a move that has baffled and frustrated residents of 400 S Green Street, the Illinois Department of Transportation has apparently ruled out a version of the Circle Interchange expansion project that would avoid building a new, elevated highway ramp above Halsted Street. At an April 3 hearing on the project, IDOT told residents the option to avoid building the flyover, known as Alternative 15.4, was “off the table, not even being considered,” according to condo board president David Lewis.

Lewis said that during an earlier meeting in March with IDOT’s Paul Schneider, the agency said that Alternative 15.4 was still acceptable. Something else changed between the March meeting and the April meeting: IDOT added a lane to the westbound side of I-290 in Alternative 15.4.

Previously, the agency had always shown five lanes where westbound I-290 passes 400 S Green, as you can see in the map of 15.4 shown below. At the April meeting, the agency showed a drawing where that section of the highway had six lanes.

There are currently five lanes on I-290 next to 400 S Green, and the agency’s “preferred alternative” — which includes the Halsted flyover and would generate a lot of noise next to residences – also calls for five lanes on this section of the highway. Streetsblog has submitted multiple requests to IDOT seeking an explanation for the addition of the sixth lane in the option that doesn’t include building a flyover. The agency has not responded.

While today is the last day for public comment on the Circle Interchange project, the case of the extra highway lane raises serious questions about why IDOT has ruled out the version of the project without the Halsted flyover. Why was the sixth lane added? If the design without a flyover still called for five lanes, how would that change the cost of the project? Answers from IDOT have been in short supply.

Until April, IDOT was showing maps of "alternative 15.4" with five lanes on westbound I-290 where the highway passes by 400 S Green Street. The cross section shown at the top of the post is marked in red on the map. View a larger version of this image.

David Lewis shows where the top of the flyover wall would be. All landscaping here would be removed. More images related to this post are available.

The Circle Interchange expansion project that the Illinois Department of Transportation has crammed into the regional planning process is projected to increase pollution and decrease transit ridership, but no one has more reason to be opposed to the project than the 57 families who live at 400 South Green.

Until one month ago, IDOT had not informed residents of the building, located on the north bank of the Eisenhower Expressway, that they could soon have a new neighbor: a 40-foot-wide flyover over Halsted Street, with 40,000 cars and trucks roaring by every day, 7.5 feet away from their building.

There is a better way to build the ramp, placing it underneath Halstead instead of next to people’s homes. Now that the Circle Interchange project is assured of a place in the regional plan, this is one of several fixes that will be needed to make it less harmful.

Residents of 400 South Green only found out about the proposed highway ramp in the beginning of March. It’s part of IDOT’s “preferred alternative,” known as “alternative 7.1C” [PDF]. The residents, who were never invited to the Project Working Group meetings, are asking IDOT to consider another design, “alternative 15.4” [PDF], which eschews a flyover and places the ramp under Halsted.

No other building, aside from a pumping station and a storage warehouse, comes so close to any new flyover – and all the noise, visual blight, and pollution that comes with it – in IDOT’s preferred alternative. Making matters worse, residents are recovering from highway-related damage, having recently spent $250,000 to shore up the building’s structure after constant vibrations from trucks hitting potholes in the Ike.

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A third level of highway infrastructure is coming to the Circle Interchange by the UIC campus.

The Illinois Department of Transportation’s Circle Interchange highway project appeared out of nowhere. It wasn’t around when the GO TO 2040 regional plan was being crafted and then adopted by 7 counties and 284 municipalities, a process that lasted from 2005 to 2010. It didn’t show up until 2012, when IDOT asked the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning – our region’s federally-designated planning organization – to insert the project into GO TO 2040. The addition of this $400 million highway project has sparked an important discussion about what went wrong and how the regional planning process can be fixed, to prevent IDOT from ambushing it again.

On Wednesday, the CMAP board voted to insert the Circle Interchange project into the GO TO 2040 plan (three committees also voted to add the project). At the same time, Randy Blankenhorn, CMAP’s executive director, acknowledged that the process was broken.

“It’s a bit of a failure in the planning process and we need to fix that.” he said. ”How do we have a plan and two years later something of this magnitude comes basically from outside the discussion in?” Blankenhorn said that plans are not fixed in stone and can be amended, but he concluded that the addition of the Circle Interchange project had damaged the integrity of GO TO 2040, echoing a point made by others involved in the process.

In opposing the amendment, the non-profit Metropolitan Planning Council wrote [PDF]:

The [GO TO 2040] process was fair and transparent, based on the projects’ merits and reflective of CMAP’s emphasis on basing investments on accountability and transparency with a results-driven project selection process. The Circle Interchange was not among the 52 regional transportation projects that advanced to the evaluation stage during the GO TO 2040 process, which included input from IDOT.

Randy Neufeld, who sits on the CMAP bicycle and pedestrian task force, is focused on preventing the same kind of “ticking time bomb” from being dropped again. “The state [IDOT] puts out a 5-year plan every year,” he said. “Only projects in the first [current] year are funded and the next four years are based on estimated revenues. The plan adds and drops projects so it’s not long-range like GO TO 2040.” Read more…

The existing Circle Interchange disrupting West Loop, Greektown, Loop, and UIC.

An expensive new interchange expansion that the Illinois Department of Transportation is pushing for downtown threatens to dump more traffic on Chicago streets, but the project still needs approval from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning to move forward. While IDOT is simultaneously proposing some improvements for biking and walking in the area, all of those could be implemented without the new highway components. The deadline for public comments to CMAP about the project is Monday.

IDOT is planning to build new car lanes and three new flyovers at the Circle Interchange, the downtown spaghetti bowl confluence of the Dan Ryan, Kennedy, and Eisenhower Expressways (I-90/94, I-290). IDOT justifies this $410 million project by saying it will improve traffic congestion, reduce crashes at this location, speed up travel time, and make it easier for truckers to drive through the interchange.

An IDOT rendering of the proposed flyover above Halsted Street. Note the plethora of trees disguising the new road.

But an analysis from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning concluded that none of these changes are guaranteed and warned that the project will lead to more car trips, more carbon emissions, and fewer transit trips [PDF]. CMAP’s Tom Garritano said “the project was not identified as a priority in the planning process that led to the development of GOTO2040,” the agency’s regional plan, in 2010. Since the project isn’t listed in GOTO2040, it can’t move forward unless CMAP approves it.

According to CMAP’s analysis, the interchange expansion is projected to convert 1,000 trips from transit to driving and increase carbon dioxide emissions by 39,000 metric tons each year. While the Circle Interchange, according to the Federal Highway Administration, is the nation’s “most heavily congested freight bottleneck,” this expensive effort to make room for traffic isn’t going to fix congestion. CMAP predicts that drivers in the region will save 1.2 seconds per trip if the project is built.

Active Transportation Alliance Executive Director Ron Burke suggested that the interchange project is a poor way to achieve transportation goals. “If you really want to address congestion in a long-term sustainable way, we need to give people alternatives to driving, especially driving alone,” he said. “We’re concerned about this emphasis on highway expansion at a time when the experience in Chicagoland and other areas shows us that it is, at best, a short-term solution to roadway congestion. In general it perpetuates land use and travel patterns that make us auto dependent creating a negative feedback loop. It’s not a sustainable way to address congestion.”

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The 46,000-mile interstate system was completed in 1991, costing a total of $216 billion (in 2012 dollars). Since then, these seven interstate highways - totaling 2,800 miles -- have been built at the cost of $45.4 billion. They were funded through Congressional earmarks. Graphic: McClatchy

The work of a sustainable transportation reporter can be a lonely lot. But it’s a lot less lonely now that two McClatchy reporters, Curtis Tate and Greg Gordon, have taken up the mantle of exposing wasteful road expansion.

With their far-reaching and well-researched three-part series, published last Sunday, Tate and Gordon brought stories of highway corruption and waste to a mainstream print audience. They spent four months researching the series, digging into 15 years of campaign finance records and interviewing leaders inside and outside of the transportation field.

“America’s highway system,” they wrote, “once a symbol of freedom and mobility envied the world over, is crumbling physically and financially, the potentially disastrous consequence of a politically driven road-building binge.”

Kentucky and South Carolina still gripped by highway madness

Tate is from the same hometown as Rep. Hal Rogers, the powerful Kentucky Republican who wields the gavel of the Appropriations Committee in the House. Tate couldn’t help but notice that Kentucky was using its federal formula funds to build Rogers’ pet project (I-66) while borrowing against future federal highway funds to do badly needed maintenance and repair work. The state has even used $4.2 million in interstate maintenance funds for I-66, despite the fact that the project didn’t meet the necessary criteria.

Meanwhile, although surrounding states have given up on their plans to create a new interstate, I-69, Kentucky charges forth. Rogers and Democratic Governor Steve Beshear “have received large contributions from road builders and highway engineers” but deny that these donations have influenced their zealous cheerleading for the project. Kentucky’s part of the new interstate will essentially stitch together three existing roads and slap the number 69 on them – meanwhile widening shoulders and reconfiguring interchanges simply to meet interstate standards. Tate and Gordon said that their “examination of campaign finance data revealed a mutually beneficial relationship between Kentucky highway contractors and their local and state elected officials.”

But this story doesn’t end with Kentucky. The push to get I-73 built in South Carolina is just as unsavory (although it doesn’t end, as the Kentucky story does, with the former governor and 15 members of his administration getting indicted on corruption charges related to politicking in the transportation department).

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Traffic backs up at North and Ashland, where people are trying to drive onto the Kennedy Expressway at the North Avenue on-ramp.

Chicagoland has a lot of traffic congestion, according to this year’s Urban Mobility Report from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute [PDF], yet we continue to build more roads while transit service and walking and biking facilities don’t seem to increase as fast. Meanwhile, gas taxes and other fees on drivers fail to pay for all the roadbuilding, meaning we’re subsidizing a very ineffective, inefficient system. A local campaign to implement congestion pricing holds the promise of easing congestion, reducing road subsides, and increasing investment in transit, biking, and walking — but only if Chicago gets it right.

TTI released its annual Urban Mobility Report earlier this week, and lo and behold, Chicago is once again on the list of the country’s most congested cities, along with New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. This isn’t exactly news. The report, which is based on a flawed methodology and often used to justify highway expansions, says the same thing every year: Congestion exerts a huge toll on our economy — $121 billion in 2011. While the report has its flaws, maybe that dollar figure can be an impetus to reduce traffic on our streets. (Here’s another one, which can’t be so easily misconstrued to support wider roads: Traffic crashes cost our country $300 billion a year.)

Increasing cycling rates will be harder as long as driving is so heavily subsidized.

The report authors make the standard recommendation to build more stuff, saying, “Projects that provide more road lanes and more public transportation service are part of the congestion solution package in most growing urban regions.” But we know that building more roads doesn’t reduce congestion. In fact, as former NJ DOT executive Gary Toth wrote on Streetsblog Capitol Hill yesterday, the TTI report is great proof that decades of highway building haven’t solved the problem.

TTI’s Chicago-specific report [PDF] shows that road capacity in the region continues to grow, as does the number of trips we make by car and by transit; the population is also slightly increasing. The authors don’t expect biking and walking to grow any faster. Given current conditions, they have a point: Even though Chicago is adding bike lanes at a rapid clip, as long as driving remains heavily subsidized, it’s harder for biking and walking – and transit – to compete.

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At IDOT's insistence, this part of Jackson Boulevard was left with a buffered bike lane instead of the originally proposed protected bike lane.

Last month we noted that the Illinois Department of Transportation prevented the installation of a protected bike lane planned for Jackson Boulevard, allowing only a buffered bike lane on the segment of the street it controls. Now we know why: IDOT will not allow protected bike lanes to be installed on Chicago streets under its jurisdiction until mid-2014, at the earliest, because the agency wants to see three years of data (presumably crash data) before signing off on this type of street redesign.

Since several Chicago streets are under IDOT jurisdiction, this policy could affect implementation of the Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 and impede the installation of protected bike lanes. Street redesigns that have proven safety benefits may be delayed or downgraded to less effective buffered lanes.

One street that could be affected, for example, is Clybourn Avenue, which is marked as a “crosstown bike route” in the Streets for Cycling Plan 2020. Though the plan doesn’t specify which routes should be protected lanes, in a brainstorming session hosted by Active Transportation Alliance in April, 2011, attendees agreed that the entirety of Clybourn Avenue should be one of the city’s first protected bike lanes. For most of its length, Clybourn is 52 feet wide, which meets the minimum width standard for protected bike lanes.

However, implementation is scheduled for May 2013 at the latest, which would make an on-time protected lane project incompatible with IDOT’s moratorium. (Clybourn Avenue has an additional issue: Much of the street has rush hour parking bans, which would complicate the implementation of any type of bike lane. If CDOT can tackle this conflict, perhaps by eliminating the rush hour parking controls, it would bode well for streets around the city with similar parking regulations, where bike lanes currently can’t be added.)

Clybourn Avenue is wide open and begging for a protected bike lane that IDOT won't allow for at least two more years.

So why is IDOT delaying designs that several American cities have already been implementing for years? The agency says it wants to measure safety impacts based on robust statistical evidence, and that three years provides a representative sample.

The rationale for requiring this information would be reasonable if Chicago was the first city to ever implement protected bike lanes, but it doesn’t hold up because the results have been the same wherever protected bike lanes have been installed: The injury rate of all street users is reduced, be they walking, biking, or driving.

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