Even before the turn of the century, before ”gridlock” became a catchword to describe driving in Du Page County, travelers complained about the road to Naperville.
It wasn`t because of congestion or construction, like today, but because of composition. The heavy plank road from Chicago, since replaced by blacktop and named Ogden Avenue, had become warped and the three-inch planks had loosened. That caused quite a clatter when a team of horses drove over them.
The plank road cost $2,000 a mile to build and worked well for a while. But its undoing, as with the pothole-prone roads of today, was the weather. Travelers eventually abandoned the old plank road for easier routes.
If only it were that easy today. Bumper-to-bumper on the East-West Tollway? Just drive down Roosevelt Road. It, too, is under construction? Take North Avenue. But the bulldozers are there, as well, ripping up pavement with metal teeth and causing headaches for everyone, even people who just want a gallon of milk from the grocery store.
Road building in Du Page County has become big business, and in the next five years, more roads will get facelifts or additions than ever before. And at no small price. To build a mile of road costs upwards of $800,000, and that doesn`t include things like expensive land for the new lanes. The Du Page County Division of Transportation, for example, is spending nearly $14 million on road projects this summer.
s so much going on in the western part of the county,” said Harold Crane, Du Page County`s chief transportation planner.
The state, county and local governments will be working on 31 roads in Du Page this summer. Some, including heavily traveled Naperville and Winfield Roads, will be closed to traffic.
It may be no small comfort, therefore, to know that the work, which can so affect our schedules and blood pressure, is almost in the autopilot stage for the departments.
There`s a loomplicated than people think it is,” said Karl Fry, Du Page County`s highway superintendent. ”There`s planning, designing, construction. But everybody who`s got a driver`s license thinks they`re a traffic engineer.”
To get a local road from idea to construction takes four to five years, Crane said. A major project, like the North-South Tollway through Du Page, takes up to 25 years, he said.
The decision to widen a road starts for Du Page County highway officials with regional transportation plans that are developed by other people, such as the Du Page County Regional Planning Commission. The plans use growth forecasts to determine what the roads in Du Page should be built by the year 2005, for example, to handle the expected growth. Such plans are the best way to decide what roads will be needed, although in some areas of Du Page, growth already has exceeded what was projected for 2005, Fry said.
”Before you know what roads are needed, you have to know how many people will live there and what the jobs are going to be,” Fry said. ”Then it`s just a matter of scheduling the actual improvements over a period of time. Obviously you can`t build them all in the last year or you`re going to have a mess. But it`s probably not necessary to do them all in the first year either.”
County officials rank the road projects by counting the amount of traffic on the roads that eventually will need expanding. When you drive across those black hoses stretched across roads in Du Page, you`ve bee county wants more precise information, it hires summer employees, usually college students home for the summer, to count the cars at each intersection. Though the job looks easy enough-workers seemingly get paid to sit in a lawnchair and get a suntan- the employees have to count every car that goes through the intersection and the direction in which each one turns.
The most precise way to count the traffic is no doubt the most arduous. A county emloyee simply drives on the roads and records how long it takes to get along certain parts of the roads. For most county roads, an acceptable speed is no less than 17 miles per hour, Crane said.
But driving eastbound on Roosevelt Road, for example, you will be traveling at less than 10 miles per hour when you approach the Naperville Road intersection.
To determine what kinds of roads are necessary, officials plan to run sophisiticated computer programs that show different routes available to get beyond roads choked with traffic. The key here is a complex formula that calculates how much time a traveler would save versus the cost of building a new route.
With all of this information in hand, the county can then determine when it`s time to start the road project. They decide the primary elements of the road: a typical intersection, the number of lanes, where the signals will go and the kind of pavement that will be used.
This phase also shows how much right-of-way the county will need. That information is turned over to Chuck Tokarski, the highway department`s chief of plans and programs. Tokarski begins the frequently unpleasant task of contacting residents and businesses along the road to buy their land. This often is controversial because, although no one likes sitting in traffic, the idea of a couple of extra lanes in the front yard is disconcerting. Residents have virtually no choice, though, because the county can condemn the land and buy it at what a court determines is a fair price.
These hurdles out of the way, they start designing the road.
Because of all the road projects now underway, the county has had to hire outside engineers to do most of its design work, Fry said. Earlier this year, for example, the county spent just over $1 million to hire eight engineering firms to design roads that will be built in the next several years. It can take a firm up to a year and a half to design the road, depending on how big the project is.
They start by going out into the field and surveying the area, plotting out the hills, curves and dips to produce a three-dimensional picture.
Back in the office, they plot the information on paper to draw up a map to design the road, often using a computer. The blueprints are complex, massive documents two to three inches thick. To the untrained observer, they look like nothing more than a series of blue lines. But the plans show everything from which trees will be cut down to how many steel supports will go in a bridge.
”Once all that`s finished-we have the plans, have the right-of-way in place, or close-not until then are we ready to go out for bids on the project,” Fry said.
It generally takes contractors two to four weeks to put together the bids, which must meet a county deadline. The county typically takes the low bidder.
Now, with more than two-thirds of the work finished, the down-and-dirty work starts. The county has inspectors who work on each road project, and they physically measure everything the constractor uses, from pipes to sod, to prevent overcharging or cutting corners.
”The way I look at it, the county`s there for two reasons: to build the road right and to build it at the cheapest costs possible,” said Paul Krueger, one of six county road inspectors. ”The contractor is out there to build the road right, but he`s also out there to make money.”
With the inspectors at all times is what`s known as the bible of road building: the Illinois Department of Transportation`s book of specifications to build roads and bridges. The 853-page book even looks like the Bible, with its almost transparently thin pages and small print. But its chapters, with headings like ”incidental construction” and ”base course” aren`t meant for a layman.
”Over a period of time, you about have it memorized after you`ve done it for a while,” Fry said. ”You really know the important things.”
The preliminary construction work usually isn`t done by the contractor who will widen or build the road. Telephone, sewer, water and electric lines often have to be moved, and that is done by the utility company, according to Bill Rohde, contract administrator for R.W. Dunteman Co., which is widening Naperville Road in Wheaton. Utilities are allowed to use part of the right-of- way under an agreement that they will move the lines before construction starts, Rohde said.
The contractor hires smaller firms to do up to 50 percent of other road work, such as removing trees and putting in curbs. The entire road or the lane being built is usually closed by this point, Rohde said.
To do the work, contractors rip up part of the existing road with bulldozers, a job easier on roads built with asphalt than those made of concrete, Rohde said.
The curbs are put in before the road itself. Underneath the curb is a layer of crushed limestone usually some four inches deep. The curbs are about nine inches deep, or as deep as the pavement, which is poured between the curbs, Rohde said.
Highways are a lot like icebergs, with only a fraction visible. Depending on how much traffic will be on the road, they can go more than two feet underground and consist of three or four layers. First, the dirt under the road, called the subgrade, must be smoothed and compacted. Then, a layer of crushed limestone gravel is added.
For example, on Winfield Road, which will be widened to four lanes from two between Warrenville and Roosevelt Roads, the gravel layer will be four inches deep. On top of that will be an inexpensive mix of gravel and asphalt, which will be 10.5 inches thick.
Above that is another mixture of gravel and asphalt about 2.5 inches thick. This layer contains more asphalt than the lower level, making it stronger and more expensive.
The top layer, which we actually see and drive on, has the highest asphalt content and is the strongest and most expensive. It will be 1.5 inches thick and seals the other layers from moisture and salt, Fry said.
R.W. Dunteman usually pours 1,200 to 3,000 tons of asphalt a day, which typically amounts to a mile-long lane of road. The asphalt must be heated to 250 to 300 degrees before it`s poured. The temperature is another thing inspectors must check.
Most county roads are made with asphalt, Fry said, whereas bigger roads, such as the North-South Tollway are made of concrete. The concrete is stronger and more expensive than the asphalt. It will be a foot deep on the tollway, with another 14 inches of gravel and compacted earth underneath, Fry said.
After the paving, the topsoil is smoothed on the roadsides and sidewalks are put in, Rohde said. One of the very last things is painting the stripes on the road, but even this is more complex than most of us would think.
On asphalt roads, instead of painted stripes, something called
”thermoplastic pavement markings” are put down. The markings are made from little pellets of plastic material that are heated and molded into the shape of a stripe.
For at least the next 5 to 10 years, until Du Page reaches its growth saturation point, this whole process will be repeated on countless county, state and local roads. Residents can expect summers heavy with the
inconveniences of roadwork at every other turn.
”We`ll be growing out of roads before they wear out,” said Fry. ”It`s kind of like raising a family: Kids grow out of things before they wear them out. We`re in the same situation in Du Page. But in 10 years, that will probably change. The growth will be much lower and we`ll have caught up with it.”
