Can the traffic problems plaguing Chicago`s booming suburbs be solved before gridlock becomes as inevitable as death and taxes?
Don`t bet your next car payment on it.
While state officials tinker with marginal improvements, like computerized traffic signals, and local officials fight to keep control over what gets built within their borders, no one is addressing the fundamental cause.
Traffic congestion is a regional problem, but there is no regional planning body with the power to supercede the development impulses of individual municipalities, and to reject or downsize big new developments that threaten to cause horrendous traffic problems.
In the Los Angeles area, where congestion and smog are the worst in the nation, air-quality officials have been given drastic powers to curb traffic, including levying $25,000-a-day fines on companies that don`t set up ride-sharing programs for employees.
But regional planning officials in the Chicago area aren`t likely to get that kind of clout-unless the situation here becomes a lot worse. In the meantime, commuters here appear doomed to spend more and more time in their cars.
”We have a crisis-reaction mentality to traffic, like most other things,” says Louis Masotti, professor of urban development at Northwestern University`s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. ”When people begin to realize that they can`t get from Point A to Point B, then they react.”
The price of trying to muddle through with Band-Aid solutions, like traffic impact fees and perfunctory planning bodies, could be staggering.
Chicago-area drivers, who already spend almost $2 billion a year in added fuel expenses and delays, could pay even more. Businesses could leave northeastern Illinois for other parts of the country, taking thousands of jobs with them. Property values could suffer.
And if the Chicago area doesn`t begin to ease its ozone problem in the next few years, it could be deprived of up to $350 million in federal highway funds. Automobile emissions are the single biggest contributor to ozone problems.
This doomsday scenario couldn`t happen here, could it?
That`s what people in California`s Orange County said 30 years ago, when orange groves abounded and you could still see the snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains some 50 miles away. Today, paradise has been paved over and cluttered with skyscrapers. On many days, you can`t see the mountains for the smog.
To be sure, Chicago`s suburbs aren`t likely to experience that sort of air pollution and congestion.
The flat expanses of the Midwest don`t trap air pollution like the mountains surrounding the Los Angeles basin do. And northeastern Illinois isn`t growing as fast as Southern California, which means there isn`t the same sense of urgency here about keeping traffic congestion under control.
But that is a mixed blessing, because it allows suburban leaders to go on talking about ”managing” congestion, as though the problem can be solved voluntarily by the municipalities who created it.
Lawrence Christmas, executive director of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, says the voluntary approach has to be given a chance, but he is skeptical it will work.
”So far, there haven`t been any big success stories with voluntary agreements,” he notes.
In California, voluntarism is being eroded as political leaders address the central issue in the war on congestion: Should local officials be stripped of their unchecked authority over land use?
In Illinois, regional planning isn`t even on the agenda. Local leaders oppose it, and state officials are reluctant to challenge home-rule authority. ”Twenty years ago, we were talking about this area becoming more like Los Angeles, with tremendous traffic jams,” Christmas says. ”Now I`m sort of feeling like it`s an `I told you so` situation.”
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To see in what direction Chicago`s suburbs are rolling, all you have to do is drive-or creep-down a Southern California freeway with Kathy LaMarr-Bines, a TRW Inc. training consultant who recently considered moving to Schaumburg.
She decided to stay in Southern California, where she car pools to her job in Orange County from the town of Fontana in neighboring San Bernardino County.
In bad weather, her 55-mile commute sometimes takes 3 hours. In all kinds of weather, she brings magazines to read while stuck in traffic.
Of Schaumburg`s traffic jams, she says: ”That`s nothing.”
The average Californian pays about $1,200 a year in wasted time and gasoline because of congestion, says The Road Information Program, a Washington, D.C.-based research group. That is more than double what congestion now costs the average Chicago-area driver, according to the transportation insitute at Texas A&M University.
And if trends continue, the Sierra Club predicts, the average speed during rush periods on Southern California freeways will slow from the current 31 miles per hour to 11 miles per hour by the year 2010.
So it`s no wonder that more and more Californians are accepting, however grudgingly, the need to consider innovative measures to get traffic under control.
Leaders are pointing out that regional planning would be a lot less painful than some fall-back solutions that could be imposed by federal and state air-quality officials, including gas rationing and odd-even driving days.
For that sentiment to take hold in Illinois, however, traffic would have to become so burdensome as to create a political groundswell to do something about it.
”Things happen in Springfield only when the people back home are ready for them to happen,” says Du Page County Board Chairman Jack Knuepfer.
Knuepfer wants the Illinois General Assembly to give counties, or some other regional authority, the power to regulate major commercial projects within municipalities. Some Lake County officials also have endorsed this approach.
But state legislators say such a step is highly unlikely, given the challenge it would pose to the home-rule authority of Chicago and large suburban communities.
”Chicago is not going to give up its home-rule status. Cook County is not going to give up its home-rule status,” says Rep. William Peterson, a Long Grove Republican.
”The Democrats have the majority in the House and Senate. Those communities are basically Democratic, and they`re not going to give up their sovereignty.”
As a result, state and local traffic-reduction measures are likely to focus on technical, not substantive, reform. And technical measures are, at best, likely to be only marginally effective. They include:
– A 20-year regional transportation plan for the Chicago area, which calls for several new expressways and mass-transit lines projected to cost more than $2.5 billion. But planners admit that few of the projects in the so- called ”2010 Plan” may be built because of declining state and federal support.
– Forcing developers to pay for the cost of new roads and other improvements made necessary by new construction, as is happening in Schaumburg and Naperville. But traffic impact fees have been unable to halt congestion in those towns.
– ”Operation Greenlight,” a five-year, $1 billion traffic-reduction plan for northeastern Illinois that will expand the capacity of existing roads with such measures as computerized traffic signals. But state officials acknowledge that even $1 billion won`t be enough to limit significantly the growth of traffic congestion.
As part of ”Operation Greenlight,” local leaders will discuss the future of key arterial roads. They will also consider model traffic-management ordinances such as one being proposed by the Du Page Mayors and Managers Conference.
But planners are skeptical that the meetings and measures will work, given the way voluntary agreements among municipalities have collapsed in the past.
”We`re still trying to see whether we can do it voluntarily,” says Christmas of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission. ”Whether it will actually work remains to be seen.”
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Gary Brennand knows that the Los Angeles area no longer has time to wait and see.
Every day, he descends from his mountainside home in San Bernardino County to his job as a TRW Inc. project manager in Orange County. Somewhere around 4,000 feet, he says, ”you start smelling the smog.”
In 1988, when the Chicago region baked in 100-degree temperatures during a record-setting heat wave, there were 26 days when the amount of health-threatening ozone exceeded U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
standards.
In 1989, the Los Angeles area violated those same EPA ozone standards on 178 days.
Today, greater Los Angeles is under a court order to meet EPA guidelines for ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and airborne particles by the year 2007.
The order was issued by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in 1984, following a complaint that the EPA was failing to enforce the Federal Clean Air Act of 1970 in the Los Angeles area.
Failure to comply with the order could cost the area millions of dollars in federal highway funds and invite draconian measures such as EPA-ordered gas rationing.
To head that off, the California legislature in 1987 granted extraordinary powers to a state agency called the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
Last March, the district unveiled a 20-year plan that takes aim at a broad range of pollution sources, including swimming pool heaters and petroleum refineries, as well as the daily driving habits of millions of Southern Californians. The first five years of the plan could cost businesses almost $15 billion.
