Federal money might not ease Chicago traffic woes

CHICAGO -- From trains to planes to automobiles, traffic tie-ups are as synonymous with Chicago as the Sears Tower, deep dish pizza and great blues bars.

A suburban traveler driving to O'Hare might get caught at an intersection blocked by a slow-moving freight train -- and then meet horrendous traffic on highways feeding into the airport.

But while the huge transportation bill President Bush signed Wednesday contains $240 million for two large-scale projects meant to ease Chicago-area congestion, the money may not be enough to cure the city's traffic ills.

"It sounds silly to say you're disappointed with hundreds of millions of dollars, but we absolutely expected to be funded at a much higher level," said Earl Wacker, director of the Chicago Transportation Coordination Office.

The bill contains $100 million to open up the nation's worst rail bottleneck and $140 million for a western access road around O'Hare -- two of the 25 projects Congress deemed of national and regional significance.

However, Illinois lawmakers had requested nine times the amount they got for the rail project. And $140 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the $1.9 billion state officials say it will take to complete the O'Hare road.

"It's a great bill, more money than we ever had, but never will it be enough," Illinois Transportation Secretary Tim Martin said.

The Federal Railroad Administration ranks Chicago as the busiest freight rail gateway in the country. Each day about 1,200 trains pass through a system taxed to its limit by inadequate overpasses, underpasses, tracks and signals.

The running joke is that it takes just as long to get goods through the city as it takes to ship them to Chicago from Los Angeles, and rail traffic is predicted to double over the next twenty years.

That's bad news for Mary Kay Ernst, who lives in the south suburb of Blue Island, where residents arrange their commutes and shopping trips around the train schedule. Traffic can be miserable near the city's rail yards, where frustrated drivers wait for scores of trains to rumble along at an agonizingly slow pace.

"You have to plan if you have to go over the tracks a lot," Ernst said.

In June 2003, the city, state and six of the country's largest railroads announced a plan to ease such woes by investing $1.5 billion in Chicago-area rail infrastructure over 10 years. They called it the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency (CREATE) program.

Because of the lower-than-expected funding, Wacker says the partnership will have to come up with a revised plan, which it will probably complete by the end of September.

"The possibility exists that the railroad industry could decide this isn't worth it and pull out of the program," he said.

Still, the railroads are interested in seeing CREATE succeed, Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said.

"With Chicago being the largest rail hub in the country, all the railroads benefit from increased velocity," Davis said.

Some community leaders and residents have clamored for western access to O'Hare for years.

"This is the beginning of ending the gridlock and traffic nightmares that have handicapped commerce west of the airport," DuPage County Board Chairman Robert Schillerstrom said after Congress passed the bill.

Todd Stevenson knows of those nightmares all too well. He sets aside an hour to fight with the taxis, trucks and limousines on his way to O'Hare International Airport, even though his family lives just 20 miles away in Downers Grove.

"It's never easy to get to the airport," Stevenson said.

The project would extend the Elgin-O'Hare Expressway to the airport's western boundary and build a bypass road. But the federal money, along with an as yet-undetermined state contribution, would fund only preliminary work like engineering and land acquisition.

Some officials fear the state will not be able to put up its match and the project could stall.

"The last resort from my point of view is raising taxes ... (but) we can't leave any money on the table. That would be a sin," Schillerstrom said.