Illinois and Indiana lawmakers resurrected a century-old plan this year for a highway to connect Chicago’s south suburbs with the Hoosier State. Now Gov. Pat Quinn and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels say they are trying to put together a deal to finally build the Illiana Expressway, promising it would create thousands of new jobs and relief for other congested highways.

But Indiana, with a budget surplus of nearly $1 billion, doesn’t have enough cash to build its 10-mile stretch of the roughly 50-mile road. Illinois, much worse off, doesn’t either. Instead, the governors want private developers to help build it, in Daniels’ words, “with other people’s money.”

Quinn visited the Lansing Municipal Airport in June and signed a bill authorizing the Illinois Department of Transportation to finance the Illiana’s construction through a public/private partnership. Daniels signed a similar bill in Indiana, and he joined Quinn at the airport to ink a memorandum of understanding promising to work together.

“Our agreement requires total cooperation and teamwork,” Quinn said at the time. “I think that’s the best way to accelerate the building of the road.”

Experts give credit to revered urban planner Daniel Burnham for first imagining the Illiana in the early 1900s. Once known as the South Suburban Expressway, it slowly moved south on planners’ maps but never materialized.

Today, lawmakers sell the Illiana as a connector highway between Interstate 55 in Illinois and I-65 in Indiana. The governors hope developers will be persuaded to invest private capital into the billion-dollar project and run it as a toll road.

Joseph Schwieterman, director of DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development, says Illinois has been slow to embrace creative financing models like this. It might be controversial, he says, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea.

“It’s the easiest way to break through the logjam,” Schwieterman says.

Using public dollars to build the Illiana would likely take at least another decade, if not longer. At the bill-signing ceremony in Lansing, though, Quinn told reporters the public/private method means the Illiana could be built within as few as six years. 

“A creative financing approach could jump-start the process,” Schwieterman says. “We could see construction begin much sooner.”

What’s still unknown is exactly where the Illiana would be built. Massachusetts-based Cambridge Systematics Inc. prepared a feasibility study for the Indiana Department of Transportation last year, when the road was expected to reach only as far west into Illinois as I-57. It studied three routes. Each ran generally from I-65 in Indiana’s southern Lake County to I-57 near Peotone.

Peotone is where Quinn wants to build Chicagoland’s third airport, another decades-old proposal. In fact, the northernmost route considered by Cambridge begins southwest of Monee at the proposed interchange for the airport. If built there, the Illiana would connect with I-65 in Indiana less than three miles south of the interchange at U.S. 231.

Another corridor studied would begin just south of the Wilmington Road interchange on I-57 and connect with I-65 two miles north of the State Route 2 interchange. The southernmost option begins at I-57 south of the Will-Kankakee county line and reaches to I-65 at the SR 2 interchange.

It wasn’t until this year that politicians started talking about extending the Illiana to I-55. Alicia Hanlon, transportation coordinator for the Will County Center for Economic Development, says the Illiana could be beneficial to a pair of transportation facilities in that corridor, so her agency lobbied for the extra mileage. 

The BNSF Logistics Park in Elwood opened in 2002 on 2,500 acres, Hanlon says, and the facility could create as many as 5,500 new jobs at full buildout. The other, CenterPoint Intermodal Center-Joliet, built on 3,900 acres, could create as many as 14,000 jobs by her figures. It opened in August.

“That is really becoming an employment center for Will County and the entire region,” Hanlon says. 

Finding a final route will be part of the Illiana’s next step: an environmental study. Though it could take a few years to finish, Daniels says he wants to line up developers while the study is under way. And he hopes it won’t take long.

“If the federal government’s serious about the economic emergency, this is the sort of thing they could do that would help a lot,” Daniels says. “Time is money.”

The Indiana governor has suggested forming a bi-state commission that would be responsible for managing the Illiana project. Though the topic didn’t come up when Daniels and Quinn spoke in Lansing, Daniels said the idea is still on the table.

“Whatever will work best for Illinois,” Daniels says.

Daniels, Quinn and their fellow politicians have made several promises about what the Illiana would accomplish. They’re backed up by last year’s Cambridge study.

Foremost, they say, the Illiana would relieve congestion on overburdened highways. Interstates 90 and 80/94 and U.S. 30 carry about 216,000 vehicles across the states’ border every day, according to Cambridge. I-80/94 alone saw more than 140,000 vehicles daily in 2003. Meanwhile, it says traffic in northwest Indiana and southeast Chicagoland, the area studied by Cambridge, could increase by 35 percent by 2030.

At the same time, Cambridge said motorists can expect to see a 23 percent increase in crashes on their highways. Several roads in northwest Indiana and Chicago’s south suburbs are already above the national average in the rate of crashes. I-80 averages 1,748 crashes a year, seven of which are fatal, and U.S. 30 sees about 1,350, six of which are fatal, according to the report.

Cambridge looked at how the Illiana would affect motorists by measuring “vehicle miles traveled” and “vehicle hours traveled.” According to its research, building the Illiana could increase vehicle miles traveled by as much as 1.1 percent, depending on where it is built, but it would reduce vehicle hours traveled by as much as 2.7 percent.

For example, Cambridge said a driver could travel from I-57 at SR 9 and reach U.S. 30 and Illinois SR 394 in 33 percent less time using the northern Illiana route. A trip from the Lake County border on I-65 to I-80 and SR 394 could be 40 percent faster on that path.

It’s clear why Hanlon says there’s “virtually no opposition to looking at the Illiana.”

Certainly it seems that way. The final version of Indiana’s bill passed that state’s Senate 42-0 and its House 89-6. In Springfield, there was just one holdout: Rep. Shane Cultra, an Onarga Republican.

“I’m against toll roads,” Cultra says. “I just, the way I feel about it is we pay road tax, motor fuel tax, and why should we be double-taxed in letting a private enterprise come in and charge us again?” 

Schwieterman acknowledges the toll problem, especially if private investors control the rates.

“I think our state, our region, already is a toll-intensive area,” Schwieterman says. “People are asking why we pay so much more than other metro areas.”

Indiana leased its toll road in 2006 to the private ITR Concessions Co. The controversial $3.8 billion lease lasts 75 years. Four years after it was signed, the cost of crossing Indiana on the northern highway has nearly doubled for some.

The cash rate for traveling the 157-mile stretch from Illinois to Ohio in a car rose from $4.65 to $8 in 2008. This summer it jumped again to $8.80. The lease gives the consortium permission to raise tolls every July after 2011 using an economy-based formula. The cost for drivers using electronic transponders remains at $4.65.

Daniels is using the lease money to fund his 10-year, $12 billion transportation infrastructure campaign, Major Moves. It calls for 104 new roadways by 2015 with 1,600 new lane miles. By the end of 2009, 34 of those roadways were open for traffic, according to the Indiana Department of Transportation. 

The Hoosier governor is especially proud of having locked down the deal shortly before the recession.

“We were fortunate in our timing with the Indiana Toll Road to hit an absolute grand slam with the mother lode,” Daniels says. “I don’t know if we’ll be that fortunate here.”

Though the Illiana will clearly create employment, the large number of jobs promised on both sides of the border has raised eyebrows this election year. 

Quinn, who said the Illiana is one of the “very best ways” to put people back to work, is battling for his job against Republican Sen. Bill Brady. Quinn’s Illiana job estimate — 14,000 new paychecks in Illinois — is slightly more modest than the one in Indianapolis.

Hoosier lawmakers, who are fighting for party control of their House of Representatives, have applied a formula of 2,000 jobs for every $100 million spent. By that math, the Illiana would create a minimum of 20,000 new jobs.

It’s only fair to note the bipartisanship surrounding the Illiana. Democrat Quinn and Republican Daniels enthusiastically touted the project in Lansing, and Brady, who could inherit the Illiana, praises it on his campaign website. Members of both parties sponsored the legislation in each capital. Still, Schwieterman said the promise of so many new jobs is premature.

“This is nowhere near shovel-ready,” Schwieterman says. “Playing the jobs card is a little misleading.”

Finally, despite his enthusiasm for the project, Schwieterman says the urban sprawl that the Illiana would prompt gives him pause. He and Hanlon say opponents might spring up once the road’s final route is determined.

“There may be a need at some point to protect land in that corridor from development,” Hanlon says. “That would prevent the Illiana from being built.”

Some Hoosiers also complain the Illiana would figuratively be a runway to the Peotone airport. Quinn has $100 million earmarked for Peotone land purchases, and his press office has said the two projects are designed to work in concert. That has caused some hand-wringing among residents in Indiana, where millions have been invested in the Gary/Chicago International Airport to earn the “third airport” distinction. Gary airport officials and Hoosier lawmakers say they’re not worried, though. The Gary airport boasts no commercial carriers 15 years after entering a compact with Chicago, but the Peotone airport doesn’t even exist. The consensus in Indianapolis is it never will.

Hanlon says the two projects have nothing to do with each other. 

“I’ve heard very little from the supporters of the Gary airport about the Illiana,” Hanlon says. “The airport is advancing kind of on a separate track. The Illiana does not need the airport to be a feasible project.”

Nevertheless, the Illinois Department of Transportation has begun eminent domain proceedings on four parcels totaling 502 acres in the area targeted for the airport.

Schwieterman says, “Illiana would be a huge boost for the Peotone effort.”

Jon Seidel covers the Indiana General Assembly for Northwest Indiana’s Post-Tribune.

Proposed Illiana expressway routes

Route AC1: Begins at I-57* south of the Will-Kankakee county line and reaches to I-65 at the SR 2 interchange.
Route AC2: Begins just south of the Wilmington Road interchange on I-57 and connects with I-65 two miles north of the State Road 2 interchange.
Route AC3: Begins southwest of Monee on Interstate 57 at the proposed interchange for the Peotone airport and connects with I-65 in Indiana less than three miles south of the interchange at U.S. 231.

* A later proposal calls for starting the Illiana at 1-55 in Illinois. 
SOURCE: Illiana Expressway Feasibility Study by Cambridge Systematics, Inc.

 
Illinois Issues, September 2010