Heavy construction, longer traffic delays coming to 3 Kane Co. roads

Motorists familiar with Route 25 and Dunham Road in St. Charles Township know that where the roads meet traffic gets quite tangled. For the next few months, that situation will get worse before it gets better.

Kane County Division of Transportation officials and contractors will begin work in the area Tuesday. Commuters can expect long delays caused by heavy construction equipment and flaggers until November.

"The intersection of Illinois 25 and Dunham Road is, frankly, a really bad intersection to begin with," said KDOT's Kevin Ahern. "Traffic already backs up. During the day, traffic isn't too bad, but during rush hour, boy, it's horrible."

That problem stems mostly because of how the intersection is configured in sort of a double-T crossing. The work starting next week will remedy that. Construction will realign a section of Dunham Road that totals less than half a mile. The section stretches from just south of the Canadian National Railroad tracks to just about the entrance of the Lamplight Equestrian Center on Dunham. That entire section will be shifted slightly west to create one intersection, instead of two, where traffic normally jams up.

All motorists should find alternate routes or expect longer travel times until the work is completed. That goes for cyclists and pedestrians who use the Prairie Path bike trail just south of Stearns Road.

Part of the Stearns Road Bridge Corridor Project will introduce a new paved path and two underpasses for users of the Prairie Path. One underpass will run under Stearns, east of the Dunham-Stearns intersection. The other underpass will be just north of the new configuration of Dunham Road and Route 25. The underpasses will be wide enough for both cyclists and pedestrians to use. There will no longer be any street level crossings for users of the path in the area.

Ahern said the original plan was to completely close that section of the Prairie Path during construction in the area, which runs until about Thanksgiving of 2010. Instead, a new plan will only close the Prairie Path for about four weeks while the path is realigned to remove it from the roadway construction area. Ahern said this decision came after taking into account the relative popularity of that particular section of the Prairie Path.

Motorists and users of the Prairie Path can follow the progress of the work at stearnsroad.com.