IDOT wants do-over to fix O'Hare traffic

Take everything you ever thought you knew about the much-hyped western bypass of O'Hare International Airport and the eastern extension of the Elgin-O'Hare Expressway and forget it.

State transportation planners Wednesday launched their multiyear "reach out" campaign to find and fix transportation woes west of O'Hare by meeting with the Elgin O'Hare-West Bypass Corridor Planning Group, an assembly of elected and transportation officials from 24 municipalities including Bensenville, Elmhurst, Wood Dale, Schaumburg, Arlington Heights and Cook and DuPage counties.

While promising to keep the last two decades worth of planning and research in consideration, planners believe the key to solving many of DuPage County's transportation headaches, is to start with a clean slate, blank maps and the input of the affected communities.

"We want to go through this from the ground up because if we have a good understanding of the transportation issues that are concerns to you, we can better come up with alternatives and respond to those concerns," said Illinois Department of Transportation project leader Peter Harmet.

Since 1990, state officials have not planned to connect the Elgin-O'Hare east to the Tri-State Tollway or the connecting western bypass, which would head south from I-90 along the western edge of the airport, creating a ring road with the Elgin-O'Hare. The projects are expected to relieve congestion on the Northwest Tollway and I-190, as well as major roads in between, like Route 83 and Arlington Heights Road.

For the next three years, the planners will be talking to community leaders and members hoping to find those solutions and others, whether they be small expressways, other forms of public transportation or new toll roads. Once a solution is selected and agreed to by a consensus of the group, they'll figure out how to pay for it.

In 2011, state planners will start working on how to pay for the projects and precisely where they would be placed. That means actual construction might not start until 2016 or later, nearly 30 years after the original battles over the Elgin-O'Hare extension.

During a 30-minute brainstorming session Wednesday night, group members broke off into teams to discuss and select what they believed to be the area's largest transportation concerns, many commenting that the same concerns exist today as in the 1970s and 1980s.

Regardless of what new construction were to take place, a majority of those attending Wednesday's meeting want to maximize the economic development in the corridor while minimizing impact on local home and business owners. Others stressed the need for, simply, better access to O'Hare.

"Build all the roads you want," Itasca Mayor Gigi Gruber said. "But if we still can't get to the airport from the west, none of this will matter."

The group will host a public-input meeting Nov. 16 before meeting again as a group to advance the ideas discussed Wednesday.