State Policy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.