State Policy

After appointees loyal to Governor Pat Quinn muscled the Illiana tollway onto the project list for Chicagoland's regional plan, it looked like nothing could stop this risky highway boondoggle from getting funded and built. The Illiana may still happen, but not without a fight.

The Sierra Club and other organizations intend to petition the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning to remove the Illiana Tollway from its regional plan, effectively disallowing the state from building the new highway. The deletion is possible because CMAP, the federally-designated Metropolitan Planning Organization for this region, is finalizing a mandatory update of its GO TO 2040 Plan.

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning's lauded GO TO 2040 regional plan prioritizes transportation investments based on performance measures, rather than through arbitrary formulas or aggressive politicking. This ensures that the hundreds of millions of federal dollars that CMAP handles are spent on projects selected on need and merit, rather than just because someone important likes the idea – which, sadly, has typically been the case in metropolitan Chicago. Yet the two major parties' candidates for Illinois governor showed only a passing familiarity with the concept when asked about it at a recent event.

The 2700 Block of West North Avenue.

[This article also appeared as a cover story in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

For the past three years, Pace has run two express bus routes down the Stevenson Expressway (I-55) from Bolingbrook and Plainfield to downtown Chicago and the Illinois Medical District, and used the expressway's shoulders to bypass traffic jams. Creating these dedicated transit lanes has resulted in better reliability -- on-time performance jumped from 68 to 93 percent -- and faster service, which when combined with comfortable (and wi-fi equipped) buses, has led ridership to jump 226 percent.

Governor Pat Quinn signed two bills today that allow the state to issue $1.1 billion in general obligation bonds to spend on highway resurfacing, widening, and bridge repair. The bills explicitly exclude transit from the new funds, and while they don't seem to exclude bike lanes, trails, or sidewalks, all of the funds are already obligated to car-centric road projects [PDF].

The Illinois Department of Transportation, whose secretary resigned last week after accusations about patronage hiring, distributed $545 million in gas tax revenue to fix streets in almost 3,000 jurisdictions last year. While this sounds like a lot of money, poor road and bridge conditions across the state can attest to the fact that these funds might not be going to the places that need them most. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the region's federally designated metropolitan planning organization, has recently written about different methods that IDOT could use to more fairly distribute these revenues across the state's cities and counties.

Local architect John Krause sees the reconstruction of North Lake Shore Drive, one of Chicago's most scenic locations, as a chance to think big -- not just about the road, but also about parks, transit, trails, the shoreline, and the future of the city alongside it. The Illinois Department of Transportation isn't used to thinking like that, though, and so Krause sees its "Redefine the Drive" project as a process "that looks and feels suboptimal."