Kane looks to spruce up Randall Road bus stops

As Kane County Division of Transportation employees laid out the 2011 plans for all the construction work they’ll be involved with it quickly became clear Tuesday that one project might be a bit more uncertain than all the others.

With nearly $68 million in expenditures planned, and the vast majority coming in the form of capital projects, only the ongoing investment in time and money to make bus service on Randall Road came into question.

Bus service on Randall Road is currently provided by Pace. However, ridership on the route has been so historically low that the Saturday runs on the route were only saved from the chopping block at the county’s behest. Now, with a mix of federal and local money, the county is hoping to spruce up the bus stop locations to attract more passengers along the county’s most important commercial corridor. Pace cited in the past the fact that passenger currently stand in the grass, or rain and snow, on a busy roadside with no sidewalks or crosswalks to even approach the bus stop locations at many points on the route as a key reason for low ridership.

Deputy Transportation Director Tom Rickert said the reason for those infrastructure hurdles is because the original vision for Randall Road development was to discourage any pedestrian traffic along the busy route.

The county now has plans to enhance 28 bus stops along Randall Road from Sullivan Road in Aurora to Route 38 in St. Charles at a cost of about $85,000.

But county board Transportation Committee Member Mike Donahue questioned the worthiness of that effort.

“I come into this process with concern over the general inefficiency of the Pace suburban bus system,” Donahue said. “The routes are fairly inefficient from a transportation standpoint. It all comes down to the ability to attract ridership to these systems. I think there is quite a bit of history that shows these operations are not efficient.”

Rickert said there are certainly ongoing concerns with viability of the bus system, particularly on Randall Road.

“Randall Road was never developed to handle transit,” he said. “As it is redeveloped, hopefully there is appropriate focus on transit. I don’t have expertise to go into the efficiency.”

Rickert acknowledged that redevelopment of Randall Road of a magnitude to actually foster public transit may take decades. The committee agreed to move forward with the bus stop improvements.