The federal government will award more than $1 billion early next month to help some cities reduce congestion, but the Chicago area — notorious for traffic jams — won’t get a penny.
It’s not that officials in the six-county region didn’t offer several promising ideas in their entry submitted to the federal Urban Partnership competition. However, the presentation, led by the Illinois Department of Transportation, consisted mainly of preliminary concepts that will require deeper analysis and feasibility studies.
One idea submitted by the Illinois team involved using vehicle-control technology to efficiently meter the flow of express buses and commercial trucks that would travel at a constant 55 m.p.h. along the center median of the Stevenson Expressway (Interstate Highway 55) between downtown Chicago and the North-South Tollway (Interstate Highway 355).
By evenly spacing vehicles in a tight formation using technology that monitors and controls stopping distances, more vehicles could use the existing lanes, expanding the capacity of the expressway, officials said.
Although it was not part of the proposal, officials said the trucking companies would pay a variable premium — higher fees during peak periods, lower fees late at night — to skirt past the unpredictable and often heavy traffic on the regular I-55 lanes. Some of the money generated would be pumped into mass-transit improvements across the region.
A different type of variable-pricing experiment was eyed for the Northwest Tollway (Interstate Highway 90), complemented by a rapid-transit bus component and upgrades to major arterial streets near the toll road.
The plan involved managing all three lanes in each direction of the tollway under a congestion-pricing strategy, producing free-flow traffic speeds at all times of day from O’Hare International Airport to Randall Road in Elgin, officials said.
And Chicago proposed variable pricing of parking garage taxes downtown. In addition, a sliding scale of fees would be charged to delivery companies, depending on the time of day and other factors.
“We want to encourage delivery companies taking up curbside parking to be more efficient and not come back to the same building three times a day,” said Kevin Smith, spokesman for the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications.
All the proposals in the federal grant application would take time — and some local investment — to implement, officials said.
But quick action — not long-range planning — is what the U.S. Department of Transportation was looking for.
Therefore, the Chicago region was not among the nine metro areas recently named semifinalists in the competition. The nine cities are preparing to implement their programs and write new laws to bring about the changes needed to ease traffic bottlenecks.
New York made it to the final round, giving a boost to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing proposal to charge cars entering Manhattan $8 per day, and trucks $21, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The other semifinalists are Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle.
About $1.1 billion will be split among up to five regions that submitted the most innovative congestion-busting programs that can be quickly implemented using what’s called the four T’s — tolling, transit, telecommuting and technology.
The goal of the contest was to encourage state and local officials to think creatively — especially at a time of shrinking federal matches for transportation projects and tight state budgets — to ease the growing gridlock facing drivers, public-transit commuters and businesses that rely on over-the-road deliveries.
The federal government made it clear proposals that featured a strong congestion-pricing component would have an advantage.
The government considers congestion pricing of transportation systems an essential tool to smoothing out traffic flow, reducing pollution and increasing the capacity of existing highways without heavy investment in new construction. The idea is to use price incentives to encourage drivers to travel at off-peak times or consider taking mass transit instead of paying a higher fee to drive on the most congested roads at the busiest times.
The political and transportation leaders in the Chicago region and in the state have been slow to break away from the status quo and embrace congestion pricing, perhaps afraid that drivers and businesses would protest the user fees. Only the Illinois tollway authority has a limited congestion fee, which is available to commercial vehicles equipped with I-PASS toll-collection transponders. Toll-rate discounts are applied depending on the time of day.
An obvious place to expand congestion pricing would be on the express lanes of the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways.
Illinois officials said they were disappointed and surprised their application to the Urban Partnership competition failed to advance. It means the Chicago area, which is the second most-congested region in the U.S., lost its chance to receive hundreds of millions of dollars. Officials attributed the lack of success to deadline pressure to submit the application, the large number of agencies involved in the process and strong competition from other regions of the country.
“We put together what we thought were some interesting concepts, but we really didn’t know where it all was going to go,” said David Spacek, IDOT’s bureau chief in the division of public and intermodal transportation.
IDOT led the Illinois effort in collaboration with the City of Chicago, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the Regional Transportation Authority, the Chicago Transit Authority, Pace, the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, and the Office of Emergency Management and Communications.
“The fact that we were not chosen is a setback, but we are going to pursue some studies and attempt to move forward soon,” said Tom Murtha, senior planner for strategic initiatives at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.
One bright spot is that the Illinois toll authority received a $750,000 federal grant in March from the Federal Highway Administration to plan for a possible congestion-pricing pilot project. The toll authority is working with the Metropolitan Planning Council to determine the scope of the project.
Toll roads, as well as existing expressways and arterial streets, will be included in the analysis covering Cook, DuPage and Lake Counties, said Joelle McGinnis, a toll authority spokeswoman.
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Our fair share of time on the road
Chicago, whose commuters spend more time on the road than those in almost every other metro area, is not in the running in a competition for big federal dollars to alleviate congestion.
HOW CHICAGO STACKS UP WITH THE SEMIFINALISTS %% Avg. commute to Commuters* work, in minutes New York 39.1 809,933 Chicago 34.3 620,379 Miami 28.7 97,896 San Francisco 28.7 151,786 Atlanta 26.6 129,335 Dallas 25.3 392,067 Seattle 23.3 172,856 Denver 23.2 193,363 San Diego 22.9 455,863 Minneapolis-St. Paul 21.3 208,067 %%
*Does not include commuters who carpooled
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
Chicago Tribune
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Contact Getting Around at jhilkevitch@tribune.com or c/o the Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Read recent columns at bancodeprofissionais.com/gettingaround.
