20,000 trucks a day: Suburban warehouse boom raises safety fears

It’s a typical weekday afternoon at the intersection of Route 53 and Laraway Road, 40 miles southwest of Chicago, and semi trucks thunder by in a steady stream.

They start at the sprawling warehouse complexes on the fringes of the city of Joliet, rumble alongside the fading polyester petals of a roadside memorial for someone who died in a truck crash and roll past the ball fields where youth teams play, carrying goods for Amazon, IKEA, Walmart, Target and Dollar Tree.

In the next 10 minutes, 150 trucks will pass through the intersection. If lined up end to end, they would stretch out more than two miles.

Three decades ago, this area was mostly prairie sprinkled with quiet subdivisions. But the early 2000s ushered in the age of online shopping. Then came the rise of next-day delivery. America’s retailers needed warehouses, fast, and the area outside Chicago — flush with interstate highways and rail lines — was perfect.

Few places in the nation have been transformed so completely, so quickly. Since 2000, retail giants and developers have erected more than 146 million square feet of warehouse space in the Chicago metropolitan area, equivalent in size to roughly 1,400 Home Depot stores.

The warehouses have generated jobs. Still, residents say what has happened here is a cautionary tale for other communities around the country hoping to cash in on the warehouse boom.

On average, roughly 20,000 trucks pass through Joliet every day. Most keep to Interstate 80, but as many as 6,400 — more than five times as many as before the warehouse boom — use local roads and state highways.

They pummel roads, belch fumes and batter the pavement, contributing to road damage that requires millions of dollars of repairs paid for by local and state governments, according to budget and grant documents.

And crashes have become more common, a New York Times analysis found.

The Times used satellite imagery, government documents and interviews with residents, law enforcement officers and traffic safety experts to identify some of the largest clusters of warehouses in the Chicago metropolitan area. Then, using state data from January 2014 through December 2024, reporters counted the number of crashes involving trucks that occurred on the surrounding roads.

Truck accidents on those roads increased by 8% from 2021 to 2024 compared with truck accidents from 2016 to 2019, the four-year period before the COVID pandemic. This is all while crashes involving other types of vehicles on these roads dropped sharply, and truck crashes across the state remained largely flat.

In recent years, an average of nearly 550 people were injured annually in truck crashes in those neighborhoods, and one person died every month.

Ian Hunnicutt was in line at the grocery store in Manhattan, southwest of Chicago, one Monday evening last October, picking up frozen pizza and sushi rolls for dinner for his 13-year-old twin boys, when his wife called.

She was hysterical. Something had happened to the kids, Ryder and Chance, while they were biking to the library. Find them, she told her husband through sobs.

He rushed through Manhattan, checking their usual haunts. Then he rounded a bend and went around a police barricade.

He found Ryder holding a single Nike shoe — Chance’s shoe. It had flown off when he was struck and killed by a semi truck while riding his bike.

“This is what Ryder was holding when my life changed,” Hunnicutt said in an interview, holding up the sandal. “When my world fell apart.”

The Warehouse Boom

Across the country, warehouses have popped up outside major cities, where land tends to be cheap. Exceptionally dense areas include Ontario, California, a city once dotted with dairy farms but now dominated by warehouses; and a stretch of Interstate 35 northwest of Dallas lined with distribution centers.

But Chicago is in a different league.

The warehouse boom in Illinois took off in earnest in the early 2000s with the construction of the CenterPoint Intermodal Center, the largest inland port in North America, where trucks and trains swap goods. It sits just outside Elwood, a village of roughly 2,200 people in Will County. In 2015, Amazon opened its first Illinois warehouse, in Joliet.

For a study about warehouses and pollution, researcher Gaige Kerr examined real estate listings from the commercial data company CoStar and determined that there were roughly 6,800 warehouses in the Chicago area as of 2022. Their combined square footage eclipsed that of warehouse space in the Los Angeles metropolitan area — home to the nation’s two largest shipping ports — by 13%.

Of the 25 largest metro areas in the country, Chicago had the most warehouse square footage per person, Kerr found.

According to the latest available data from the Illinois Department of Employment Security, warehousing and transportation was the largest sector in Will County in 2024, employing nearly 37,000 people. Amazon is Will County’s largest employer.

“I think people have to look at this as an economic advantage,” said Mark Denzler, the president and chief executive of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association.

But for years, residents have complained about miserable conditions, which have been chronicled in news articles and lawsuits. Some said they have given up on the promises from local officials that the boom would usher in a renaissance of restaurants and shopping centers.

Some still drive two or three towns over for groceries, even though they are surrounded by warehouses stocked with the things they need. In certain places, retailers and developers — many of which receive hefty tax incentives from the state — have gobbled up much of the usable land and pushed property values to levels that were once unimaginable.

And many of the jobs that were created are part time or low paying. In 2024, the majority of full-time employees at the Amazon Joliet facility made an average annual salary just shy of $34,000, per a report filed with the state.

Developers have continued to build.

This year, a 1.1 million-square-foot logistics facility is scheduled to open next to the only school in Elwood, just over a quarter mile from home plate of the school’s baseball field. Thousands of trucks could pass by each day.

Trucks Traversing ‘Die 80’

The increase in traffic, unsurprisingly, has led to more crashes.

Madison Rose Frost was 8 when she was killed in March 2014 after her family’s minivan was struck by a truck on Route 53. Ten years later, Robert Roach Jr., 32, died just a few miles from Madison’s roadside memorial following a collision with a stalled semi.

Such stories are steady: A truck driver, unaware that a vehicle had become lodged beneath his trailer, barreled down Interstate 294, dragging the car — and the woman inside — with it. Miraculously, she survived. A man was hit and killed in downtown Joliet minutes after he had been released from jail.

Sara Wittchen said she worries about crashes, something she never did while growing up in Joliet. “Fatal accidents were reserved for 2 a.m. on the highway with a drunk driver,” Wittchen said. “It wasn’t Grandma Lucy in an Enclave going to Target.”

In Will County alone, in the span of two months last fall, at least seven people died in accidents involving trucks. So far this year, at least 60 people have been injured in crashes, and two people have died.

The accidents are not always the fault of the truck driver. But the hazards tend to be greater for the motorists in smaller vehicles, and residents have become increasingly wary of driving around town.

Some even have a nickname for the stretch of I-80 that passes through Joliet: “Die 80.” More than 60,000 people have joined a Facebook group called “I-80 and I-55 Corridor DAILY DEATH TRAP.”

It’s where Ryan Hart was killed in 2020, when a truck rear-ended his camper at the height of morning rush hour. The camper, and four other vehicles, were engulfed in flames. Another motorist was also killed.

Bob Ilibasic, a terminal manager at a trucking company, was a close friend of Hart’s.

“He’s never going to see the grandkids,” Ilibasic said. “All for a truck that didn’t stop.”

Residents Fighting Back

Data from the Illinois Department of Transportation shows that the most hazardous places are the interstates, where truck crashes that cause traffic backups are common. But collisions occur on residential roads, too, even those that ban or limit trucks.

Trucks may end up on these roads — and closer to residential areas — when the interstates get backed up. State data shows that more than 200 crashes from 2014 through 2024 involved damage to homes, playgrounds and schools. They flattened fences, tore through yards and smashed mailboxes.

Don Schaefer, the president of the Mid-West Truckers Association, said drivers are forced onto a smaller number of routes as more municipalities try to restrict the use of local roads.

“There simply aren’t enough truck routes,” he said.

Many trucking companies don’t build in time for delays, said Zach Cahalan, the executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, an organization focused on reducing the number of deaths and injuries from truck crashes. Some truckers may feel pressure to make up lost time, he added.

“Truck drivers pay the cost,” Cahalan said. “And of course, crash victims.”

Several police departments have added truck enforcement units to ticket drivers who violate weight and size rules. Joliet’s unit, for one, brought in $2.2 million in fines in its first 15 months, though city officials said many truck drivers have continued to break the rules.

A representative for Joliet wrote that the city is trying to divert trucks away from local roads: “Through recent agreements tied to major logistics developments,” the statement said, the city “has required the use of a closed-loop truck network specifically designed to keep trucks off neighborhood streets.” But residents are skeptical that the designated loop will curb traffic from warehouses outside of the NorthPoint development.

Some residents and local governments have taken steps to stop more development or to reduce traffic near residential areas, with mixed results.

After Delilah LeGrett moved homes, in part because trucks would rumble past her front door, she learned that NorthPoint, a Kansas City-based developer, wanted to move in, too. Her house is along the edge of a proposed logistics complex in Will County that, if completed, would be five times the size of Midway International Airport.

The complex has been mired with lawsuits, including by LeGrett and her neighbors, locking up development and construction. But a settlement last year ironed out truck-route access, and the pending outcome of suits this year means the facility could soon break ground. NorthPoint declined to comment.

In a statement, Jennifer Bertino-Tarrant, Will County’s executive, wrote that the county is spending more than ever to alleviate traffic, make streets safer and reduce air pollution.

Manhattan, where Chance Hunnicutt died, has increased its number of officers on truck enforcement patrol over the past five years, from three to eight. But other changes are slow going.

Following Chance’s death, officials put stop signs at the intersection of U.S. Route 52 and North Street, where he was hit. But the signs are a temporary measure until a permanent solution is determined. Ryan Gulli, the chief of police in Manhattan, said the accident is under investigation. No criminal charges have been filed.

Chance loved the Grateful Dead, Purdue basketball and reptiles. The twins had planned to open a pet shop when they grew up: Ryder would run the business, and Chance, who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, would take care of the animals.

“I just keep waiting for him to come out of his room,” Ian Hunnicutt said. “There’s a big part of me that just can’t swallow the fact that he’s gone.”

About two weeks before Hunnicutt lost his son, another son lost his father when a semi turned onto Route 53. The truck collided with a Dodge Dart, killing the Dodge’s driver, 40-year-old Adam Sigler.

His 2-year-old son, who was strapped in the back seat, survived.

· This article was reported in partnership with Big Local News at Stanford University. Cheryl Phillips contributed reporting.