Many parking lots, roads in bad shape
Nearly every suburb has at least a few commercial parking lots or public roads with crumbling concrete or potholes in need of patching.
The brutal winter was only partly to blame; the weak post-recession economy has led many commercial and residential property managers to defer maintenance of their parking lots, said John Melaniphy, a real estate economist and market analyst with Melaniphy & Associates Inc. in Chicago.
“It's a cash-flow issue, but it's also a weather issue,” he said. “Many shopping center maintenance or management people don't rush out to patch the parking lot until the weather improves, so when they do patch it, it's gonna last. In this economy, people want it to last.”
As the price of oil has jumped, so has the price of asphalt, making a parking lot repair project far more costly than it was last year at this time, Melaniphy added.
As for the public roads, suburban public works officials say they're actually in pretty typical condition for late winter/early spring. Many of the roads in the worst shape are scheduled to be repaved or reconstructed later this year, including trouble spots in Rolling Meadows, Lake Zurich and West Chicago.
“I don't think the roads are any worse than normal for late winter,” said Elgin Public Services Director Dave Lawry. “What may have been different this year is that it stayed colder longer, so we're seeing more potholes now as the weather warms up.”
The Illinois Department of Transportation said its roads are actually in better-than-normal condition now, thanks to a 2009 $31 billion capital program that allowed them to reconstruct and resurface many older roads.
“There's been a significant drop in the number of potholes that have been reported,” said IDOT spokesman Guy Tridgell. “This has been a good year for IDOT.”
It also reduced the amount of road patching materials IDOT used by more than 80 percent. In District 1, which is Cook and the collar counties, they've so far used 1,083 tons of patching material compared to nearly 13,000 tons in 2008, Tridgell said.
One stretch of road that's a daily source of complaints is New Wilke Road between Golf and Algonquin roads in Rolling Meadows. Mayor Ken Nelson recently referred to it as “a test of any car's suspension system.” Now that some details have been ironed out and state funding has been secured, he expects repairs to begin this summer.
That's also the case with some of Lake Zurich's worst stretches. Miller Road between Route 12 and Briarwood is among the streets slated for repair this year, as is Lions Drive between Miller and Main Street, public works officials said.
Among IDOT's many planned road improvement projects this spring is a crumbly 6-mile stretch of Route 59, between Batavia Road and North Aurora Avenue, which will be resurfaced next month.
Many suburbs, including Arlington Heights, are seeing some of their older roads deteriorate now because they were built during the 1970s and 1980s using a mixture that doesn't last as long as concrete. Repairs would require road resurfacing and reconstruction projects, which are costly for municipalities and inconvenient for motorists.
Potholes, however, can usually be patched within 24 hours. Most suburbs have crews out every day responding to pothole complaints. It's still too cold to fix them with a permanent hot mix, so a cold mix is being used until a permanent mix can be used later this spring.
The city of Elgin has four pothole patching crews.
“We're staying ahead of the weather so far,” Lawry said.