History
The Illiana Corridor would become the third east–west expressway to connect northeastern Illinois and northwest Indiana. In 1953, the Kingery-Borman expressway combination opened. Subsequently a part of Interstate 80, this route would become part of one of the most important coast-to-coast Interstate highways in the United States. The Chicago Skyway opened five years later, on April 16, 1958. With the newly opened Indiana Toll Road, the Skyway and Toll Road became part of a second coast-to-coast Interstate highway, as Interstate 90 ran through city of Chicago proper.
The Skyway-Toll Road combination paralleled the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and was a popular road until the Dan Ryan Expressway opened in 1962, with Interstate 94 providing a free route from Chicago to northwestern Indiana. For a brief time in the 1970s and 1980s, the city of Chicago considered tearing down the Skyway because of escalating maintenance costs and falling traffic volumes.
Shortly after a feasibility study was announced for an Illiana expressway concept, a group of citizens organized the opposition group Citizens Against the Privatized Illiana Toll Road (CAPIT).
As of June 9, 2010, governors Pat Quinn of Illinois and Mitch Daniels of Indiana have brought the project to life. A bill was signed, SB3659, that will incorporate states partnering with private groups to plan, build, and maintain the proposed expressway. The Illinois Department of Transportation had three proposed alternative route locations in its Final Report published on April 30, 2010; however, the current study is looking at eight primary routes with several potential connecting points.
Read more about this topic: Illiana Expressway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)