While making his pitch to the Waukegan City Council at a recent meeting, Regional Transportation Authority Executive Director Richard Bacigalupo compared his agency’s plan to build a $77 million transit hub at the city’s lakefront to the work of Daniel Burnham, the architect who planned Chicago’s lakefront system of parks.
Within five years, he said, commuters could easily stroll between downtown and the lakefront, transfer between buses and Metra trains with minimal hassles and run errands at shops and service businesses in and around the transit center.
“It’s a really exciting opportunity for downtown redevelopment, and we’ll be able to make transit work right in the middle of it,” Bacigalupo said. “It’s Burnham-esque.”
Aldermen approved the plan in concept, with the understanding that financing will have to be tackled later. City and RTA officials said that money probably will come from local, state and federal sources.
Billed as the City of Waukegan Intermodal Transit Facility Study, the report was prepared by the Regional Transportation Authority with input from city and county planners and planning firms DLK, Dewalt Hamilton Associates and Valerie Kretchmer Associates.
The key to the plan is a massive pedestrian walkway over the Amstutz Expressway, a stretch of four-lane highway about 2 miles long known as the “road to nowhere.”
The walkway would follow the Madison Street alignment and extend across the Amstutz and to the lakefront.
Currently, commuters who need to catch a bus or train have to negotiate a tangle of pedestrian-unfriendly ramps and bridges over the Amstutz.
“This has been a long time in coming,” Waukegan Ald. Ray Vukovich said. “I’ve been taking the train to Chicago a lot recently, and there’s no doubt in my mind that we need to connect downtown and the train station.”
Reconnecting downtown Waukegan with its lakefront has been a primary goal of the Waukegan Downtown Association since a revitalization drive began in 1995.
As envisioned in the plan, the pedestrian walkway would be wide enough to be turned into a park, offering activities such as farmers markets in summer and ice skating in winter.
