Recent Streetsblog CHICAGO posts about Illiana Tollway

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The Illiana Expressway Will Eat Itself

By Phineas Baxandall and Jeff Inglis |
The Illiana Expressway fails on all measures — expected revenue, projected traffic — when looked at realistically. Unfortunately, Illinois and Indiana don’t look at it that way. Image: Parsons Brinckerhoff A recent report by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group, “Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future,” examines 11 of the most wasteful, least […]

Revolt Against Illiana Undeterred By IDOT’s Latest Scare Tactic

By Steven Vance | | 12 Comments
Local advocates are scoffing at the suggestion, made by an Illinois Department of Transportation representative last week, that striking the Illiana Tollway from the Chicago region’s long-term regional plan would jeopardize transportation spending across the entire region. Instead, advocates insist that deleting the costly, sprawl-inducing road would cause at most a brief procedural delay in other […]

Preckwinkle, Environmental Groups Want CMAP to Drop Illiana

By Steven Vance | | 25 Comments
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 […]

Illiana Boondoggle Now Guaranteed to Cost Taxpayers At Least $250 Million

By Shaun Jacobsen | | 16 Comments
Remember the “innovative” public-private partnership Governor Quinn lauded as a way to build the “21st century” Illiana Expressway, without shifting the entire cost onto the general public? Or remember CMAP’s statement opposing the project, based on its contradictory growth projections, overestimated benefit to the region, and severe financial risk, and the multiple op-eds and articles that followed, all expressing concern about the expressway’s ability to […]

What Good Chicagoland Regional Planning Looks Like

By Steven Vance | | 9 Comments
By now, Streetsblog readers know all about how the Illiana Tollway, a proposed highway that will see little use and cost taxpayers $500 million, has messed up our regional plan. Last October, the MPO Policy Committee of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning voted to add the Illiana to the GO TO 2040 plan, allowing […]

The Only Problem the Illiana Solves Is a Political One

By Steven Vance |
The Illiana Tollway is a solution in search of a problem, and the Illinois DOT’s final document in preparation to receive federal approval to build the tollway is a case study in backwards transportation planning. IDOT’s playbook went like this: Design a new road, have consultants review traffic patterns on existing roads to find issues to underpin […]
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