Bo Proczko recalls driving down Spring Road in Oak Brook on his way to work about 20 years ago when his aging Volkswagen gave out.
There was a long walk to the nearest gas station in Hinsdale to get a tow truck and report the disabled vehicle to the Oak Brook police.
“The policeman asked me when I was going to move it,” said Proczko, now the assistant village manager in Hinsdale. “They had already had some complaints from residents.”
Such is the transportation dilemma in east central DuPage County: Residents love the tax dollars that development brings but don’t like the traffic.
Hinsdale is an old railroad suburb that decided in the 1960s to stay that way. Since then it has resigned itself to the urban sprawl around it.
Neighboring Oak Brook is an affluent creature of the auto age. It has never quite been comfortable with the volume of traffic its regional mall and office towers generate, although it is amenable to the tax revenues they produce. It has no commuter railroad; an electric railroad built in the 1920s got no closer than Westchester.
“It’s a problem getting out of my driveway at 5 o’clock in the evening because of the southbound traffic” on York Road, said Arthur W. Philip, an Oak Brook resident for 33 years, a Village Board member for 12 years and now chairman of the Illinois Toll Highway Authority. “Elmhurst and Hinsdale have sealed off their towns. They don’t want people driving north and south through their communities.”
The two suburbs are flanked by the Tri-State Tollway and Illinois Highway 83, which has been rebuilt over the years into a limited-access artery, though not quite to tollway standards. Oak Brook also is bisected by the East-West Tollway.
But that highway system has been a mixed blessing. Urban sprawl–more politely called decentralization–has caused dramatic increases in traffic on the tollways and arterials despite the best efforts of highway engineers.
The Illinois Department of Transportation’s biennial traffic counts show that the average number of vehicles using the Tri-State in Oak Brook has increased from 58,000 in 1973 to 127,900 in 1997. Traffic on the East-West over the same span had an even bigger jump, to 136,200 from 42,700. Traffic on Illinois 83 has increased to 71,900 in 1997 from 32,200 in 1973.
Robert Bruegmann, a professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been studying the phenomenon of urban sprawl and suburban centers such as Oak Brook for most of his career. He believes the urban expressway system, which was planned during World War II and built mainly in the 1950s, contributed to decentralization of the metropolitan area and emergence of retail and business centers such as Oak Brook.
Except for Interstate Highway 355, completed in 1989, there has been no expressway building done since then. Both the proposed Crosstown Expressway in Chicago and Fox Valley Freeway on the western border of DuPage fell victim to coalitions of opponents.
The lack of new expressways has prevented the development of new suburban centers since the 1970s and increased concentration of business at the existing ones, Bruegmann said.
In DuPage, the Oakbrook Center shopping mall opened in 1962, Yorktown Center in Lombard in 1968, and Fox Valley Shopping Center in Aurora in 1975. The newest, Stratford Square in Bloomingdale, opened in 1981 without benefit of a nearby expressway.
“The highway congestion problem has to do with the fact that we stopped building expressways,” Bruegmann said.
“It appears (suburban centers) are a product of a specific time and place: America’s interstate highway boom. No one in 1950 had campaigned for these roads, except the cities (such as Chicago) to get people to the center cities. No one dreamed they would result in these suburban centers.”
In an office in downtown Chicago, an agency called the Chicago Area Transportation Study culls U.S. Census data to provide a statistical snapshot of suburbs. The data show that Oak Brook in 1990 had 9,178 residents, 4,302 of whom had jobs. But only 586 residents worked in town; the rest commuted elsewhere.
The real story, according to the 1990 CATS data, is that 36,200 people commuted to work in Oak Brook each day, some from as far away as Milwaukee and Valparaiso, Ind. That doesn’t include the 28,011 shoppers and visitors to Oakbrook Center’s 176 stores on an average day in 1998, according to data provided by Suzanne Beres, marketing director for the agency.
Only 410 of the people who commuted to work in Oak Brook each day came by bus, according to the CATS data. The largest number of commuters, 177, were from Chicago. Three-fourths of the nearly 4,000 Chicagoans who worked in Oak Brook drove alone in their cars.
Ninety-eight percent of the suburban commuters came by car, and 90 percent drove alone.
The loners account for 31,691 vehicles on Oak Brook streets each rush hour.
As far back as 1966, when CATS took its first statistical look at suburban malls, the agency warned that the lack of mass transit and America’s love affair with the auto would cause traffic congestion. In those days, Oakbrook Center was slightly more than half the size it is today and had half the patronage.
Congestion had become such a problem by 1978, when there were half as many jobs as there are today, that the village asked CATS to take a look at the problem once again. The agency concluded there were three rush hours daily–morning, lunch and evening–but that through traffic and shoppers were the biggest causes of congestion. Nevertheless it recommended the village push for an aggressive car-pooling program. Mass transit was not considered an option.
Oak Brook, like many auto age suburbs, isn’t designed to accommodate mass transit, said Joseph DiJohn, director of the UIC’s Urban Transportation Center metropolitan support initiative and former executive director of the Pace suburban bus system.
“The lack of pedestrian access to buses in DuPage is still the big issue,” DiJohn said. “Every bus rider is a pedestrian until they get to the bus. The suburbs are not particularly pedestrian-friendly, and Oak Brook is typical, especially around the mall.”
Pace over the years has had difficulty establishing terminals at suburban mall entrances, DiJohn said. The mall managements believe they interfere with shoppers’ access and consume parking space for cars.
The six Pace routes that serve Oakbrook Center collectively carry an average of 5,409 riders a day, according to 1998 data provided by the agency. More than 70 percent of that ridership is carried on a single route, No. 322, which runs from the Chicago Transit Authority’s Douglas Park rapid-transit line terminal at 54th Avenue in Cicero as far west as Yorktown Center in Lombard, with a stop at the Oak Brook Mall. That route carried an average of 3,794 riders a day in 1998. The others varied between 61 and 663 riders a day.
“The largest group of riders who use the Oak Brook service are mall employees,” DiJohn said. “Many of them come from Chicago to their jobs. Pace does not carry a lot of suburb-to-suburb riders.”
Competing against the auto in DuPage has been tough. The number of vehicles registered in the county increased by nearly 183 percent from 1970 to 1995, when there were 605,235 passenger cars registered–200,000 more than the number of registered voters.
Auto use in DuPage as measured in vehicle miles increased 116 percent from 1970 to 1990. “Transit ridership increased somewhat, but not at that rate,” DiJohn said.
One major traffic bottleneck in Oak Brook is 31st Street between Jorie Boulevard and York Road. The county plans to spend $4.6 million widening it to four lanes if it can acquire the right of way from the village, said Chuck Tokarski, DuPage County engineer. The street west of Jorie was widened to four lanes a few years ago.
Because of the mall and adjacent office buildings, Oak Brook has no choice but to try to accommodate the car. But neighboring Hinsdale, which traces its origins to an 1830s stagecoach stop, has taken a different approach.
Hinsdale began developing after the Civil War, when the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (now Burlington Northern Santa Fe) came to town. The affluent community, with 1,760 people a day boarding trains at its three stations, has among the highest per capita commuter rail ridership in Chicago’s suburbs. Hinsdale’s population is about 17,500.
The problem in Hinsdale, like most railroad suburbs, is that the people who travel to jobs there do so by car. Only 98 of the 13,305 employees in town used the train, according to 1990 CATS data. Another 108 rode the bus.
Almost 11,000 drove alone in their cars, a problem in a community that developed around the railroad long before the boulevards and arterial highways typical of Oak Brook were built. Hinsdale’s main drag, Garfield Avenue-York Road, is essentially a two-lane street.
Only 1,277 workers in Hinsdale rode in car pools. The balance either walked, rode bikes, took taxis or worked at home.
But over the years traffic congestion also has been an issue as the suburb fought to keep its quiet residential streets that way.
“There were some residents concerned about cut-through traffic. We don’t hear much about that anymore, although I don’t know why,” Proczko said.
He was referring to the furor in 1987 when some residents organized to fight plans to upgrade and widen key north-south routes through town. The uprising caused village officials to commission an $85,000 study to determine who was using the streets.
The consulting firm interviewed 24,210 drivers at 15 locations and found that more than half of the traffic was local. Most of the rest was commuters passing through town.
The residents then did a survey of their own by checking municipal vehicle tags on cars on Garfield Avenue. They said 80 percent of the vehicles on that street were from out of town.
The widening of Illinois 83 on the western edge of town and elimination of its intersection with Chicago Avenue in the 1980s probably has reduced some traffic cutting through town, Proczko said.
Adding interchanges on the Tri-State on the eastern border of Hinsdale and Oak Brook might seem to be an obvious way to ease some traffic congestion on local streets, but that would cause increased congestion on the tollway, Philip said.
There is a four-way interchange at Ogden Avenue in Hinsdale but no four-way interchanges in Oak Brook. “Oak Brook for 20 years has asked for a southbound (tollway) entrance off 22nd Street, but still doesn’t have it,” Philip said.
The toll authority has a waiting list for at least 25 exits and entrances to its system. “There is political influence from all directions, but we have to guard against too many exits,” Philip said.
