Illinois Tollway

Adding new asphalt on the 22 miles of the Tri-State between Rosemont and Oak Lawn would be a waste of money because highway expansion inevitably induces more traffic.

Last week's Streetblog Chicago post about Mayor Rahm Emanuel's O'Hare express train proposal struck a chord with readers, with dozens of retweets and almost 100 comments. Lots of people agreed that the existing CTA Blue Line run between the Loop and "the world's busiest airport" is already a relatively fast, high-quality service. Many readers also concurred that an airport express would be costly to build and expensive to ride, which makes the project a bad use of taxpayer money that could be better spent improving neighborhood transit.

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.

The nation may be driving less, but Illinois road boosters are still determined to build more highways. The problem for Illinois taxpayers is that it may be impossible to construct these new roads without huge subsidies.

The Illinois Department of Transportation is pulling another bad idea out of its old bag of tricks, proposing to add two traffic lanes on the Kennedy Expressway between Harlem Avenue and Cumberland Avenue. Also included in IDOT's proposal are modified ramps at Cumberland and a new ramp onto the Tri-State Tollway (I-294).

The Illinois Department of Transportation is moving forward with its portion of the 47-mile Illiana Tollway in rural Illinois and Indiana, issuing a "request for qualifications" to potential contractors. The document sheds light on how the state intends to finance the billion-dollar highway -- and how taxpayers will be on the hook.