A six-lane superhighway on the planning books since the 1960s will finally open next month, which will help for now to ease congestion on what originally were rural roads in Will County, but which also will contribute to growth and future traffic headaches.
The 12½-mile southern extension of the North-South Tollway (Interstate Highway 355) cuts through prairies, forests, farms and wetlands close to where residential subdivisions, office parks, warehouses and malls are rapidly being developed.
The $730 million tollway extension runs three lanes in each direction through more than a dozen communities from Bolingbrook to New Lenox and connects Interstate Highways 55 and 80. The northern terminus hooks up with the existing 17.5-mile portion of I-355 that runs from I-55 to Army Trail Road in Addison and connects with Interstate Highway 290.
In a one-time opportunity, the public is invited to ride their bicycles along the I-355 extension before it opens to vehicle traffic.
The bike ride starts at about 9 a.m. on Nov. 11 near 127th Street and I-355 in Lemont and goes until about 12:30 p.m. on a 20-mile loop. A registration fee will go toward preliminary engineering on a bike and hiking trail alongside the tollway extension, officials said.
Information is available at www.rollthetollway.org. A 5K Run-Walk-Roll will also be held. The bike and hiking trail would cost between $8 million and $10 million, according to tollway estimates. Funding has not been identified. The trail would connect with other trails from Woodridge on the north end to the Centennial Trail and the Illinois & Michigan Canal Trail farther south.
“The unique thing about this project is that it crosses a lot of political boundaries: Three counties, three forest preserve districts, and 13 towns and park districts,” said Deborah Jan Fagan, the county trail system coordinator in DuPage County.
During ceremonies on Nov. 11, which is Veterans Day, I-355 will officially be named the Veterans Memorial Tollway. Once it is open to traffic as early as Nov. 12, weather permitting, the I-355 extension will shave an average of 20 percent off travel times, according to the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority.
“This is the first toll road built in Illinois in about 20 years,” said Brian McPartlin, executive director of the toll authority. “It will improve the quality of life in the fastest-growing county in the state and connect drivers to other toll roads in the system.”
The mayors of towns along the corridor enthusiastically support the transportation improvements, while also embracing the tollway extension as an engine of economic development.
It’s the same argument made by many south suburban mayors who back development of a major regional airport on farmland near Peotone in Will County.
But there are concerns that leapfrogging from the existing two-lane roads in Will County to construction of a major highway–skipping a phased approach that includes expanding existing roads and introducing more mass transit–will accelerate sprawl.
The fact that the I-355 extension has six interchanges is likely to work against keeping growth at a manageable pace, some longtime residents said. The interchange ramps, providing tollway entrances and exits, by themselves do nothing to facilitate the stated goal of better north-south travel through the region.
“The extension is welcomed but also feared because of the traffic and sprawl it will bring,” said Evelyn Walano of Homer Township. “We are still a bunch of small communities that are growing possibly too fast. People are concerned,” added Walano, who is Homer Glen’s chairwoman of a multiagency advisory committee working on the proposed bike trail.
Most opponents of the I-355 extension have long since moved on to other battles, conceding the deep support for the project.
“This is the choice they made,” said Nancy Wagner, a senior policy advocate at the Environmental Law and Policy Center. “Yes, it will contribute to sprawl. And, yes, it is what they want.”
The center hired Wagner about 10 years ago to stop the I-355 extension, which was delayed by lawsuits filed by the Sierra Club and other groups, mostly on grounds that other options were not fully studied.
The extension project started in late 2004 as part of the toll authority’s $5.3 billion congestion-relief program.
“Every opportunity was given to look at alternative local road improvements and mass-transit options,” Wagner said. “In the future, we hope that more communities will follow the lead of Lake County, which said no to the Illinois Highway 53 extension and is exploring other things than just a six-lane tollway.”
The extension is projected to handle traffic loads through at least 2030, said McPartlin, the tollway director.
But because of traffic volumes that are already increasing on nearby roads, the toll authority decided that the entire stretch of the I-355 extension would open with three lanes in each direction, instead of the initial plan of starting with two lanes from 127th Street to I-80 and expanding over time, he said.
An average of 199,310 vehicles traveled on the existing I-355 each day in 2005, according to the latest statistics available from the toll authority. That’s up from 116,106 vehicles a day in 1990, a year after the original I-355 opened. Daily traffic projections suggest that about 125,000 vehicles a day will use the I-355 extension when it opens next month, the toll authority said.
The extension will have one mainline toll plaza, Spring Creek, north of Bruce Road and eight ramp plazas.
The I-355 extension is being completed on time and within budget, according to the toll authority.
It wasn’t always the case. At one point rising costs for materials were pushing the project $80 million to $100 million over its $730 million budget, largely associated with constructing the 1.3-mile Des Plaines River Valley Bridge. It is the second-longest bridge in Illinois, after the 2-mile-long Abraham Lincoln Memorial Bridge on Interstate Highway 39 over the Illinois River Valley.
V3 Companies of Illinois, the project’s construction manager, offered a competition for construction firms to redesign the Des Plaines valley bridge to keep the work within budget, said Tom Valaitis, construction division director at V3. Walsh Construction Co. was the low-bidder with a design and construction plan costing $125 million.
The design incorporated a post-tensioning method to reinforce the concrete and other structural elements, while also locating the bridge piers away from the breeding grounds of the endangered Hine’s emerald dragonfly in the forest below the span.
In addition, the 100-foot height of the bridge was designed to stay above the flight path of the dragonfly, sparing the insect from splattering against the windshields of fast-moving vehicles.
“The tollway made a commitment as part of the permitting to continue to study the impact on the dragonfly for several more years,” Valaitis said.
