Illiana Expressway: 8/26/07

Flooding on the Borman Expressway -- I-80 & I-94 in Northwest Indiana -- shows the need to build an alternate east-west interstate highway through the area. Rising waters from last week's storms led to all lanes being closed on the Borman Expressway, blocking traffic on of the nation's busiest east-west routes.

Writes the Northwest Indiana Times:

The Borman flooding, which closed the expressway for days and forced heavy traffic onto local streets, also reinforces the need for alternative highways like the Illiana Expressway.

These additional highways must be quickly engineered and constructed to handle the growing traffic and to provide alternatives when one of the area's main roads must be fully or even partially closed.

Indiana transportation and political leaders said the same thing -- the Borman Expressway flood shows the need to build the Illiana Expressway.

Writes the Northwest Indiana Times' Patrick Guinane:

Had the Illiana Expressway been handling traffic -- instead of gathering drawing-board dust -- local roads could have been spared the deluge of cars diverted last weekend from the waterlogged Borman Expressway, transportation officials said Monday.

For naysayers, hoping that transportation problems will solve themselves by halting new road construction is faulty logic. When the Borman Expressway was closed, trucks and cars traveling from New York to California and points in between flowed into Northwest Indiana city streets seeking alternate routes.

And, it is foreseeable that accidents, roadwork, heavy snow, or any number of other reasons could block the Borman Expressway.

From the Northwest Indiana Times:

Andy Dietrick, an Indiana Department of Transportation spokesman, agreed "it would have been helpful to have had another alternate route, such as the Illiana Expressway, onto which east-west through traffic could have been diverted."

It signals why some lawmakers believe talk about the expressway should give way to building it.

"Had it been built 20 to 30 years ago when we first started talking about the idea, then, yeah, we wouldn't have been looking at the problems we had (last weekend)," State Rep. Dan Stevenson, D-Highland, said.

In its current incarnation, the long-stalled highway would connect Interstate 57 in Illinois with Interstate 65 in Lake County. INDOT last week selected Cambridge Systematics, a Massachusetts firm, to conduct the Illiana route study the Legislature mandated this spring.

Let's build the Illiana Expressway so that trucks and cars don't have to travel Northwest Indiana city streets to avoid Borman Expressway traffic jams, construction, and floods.