ROAD WARRIORS

In the spring of 1984 road construction crews headed out onto the Eisenhower Expressway, positioning temporary concrete barriers to begin a major two-year reconstruction project. The barriers were used to choke down the city`s major east-west traffic corridor from six lanes to four, two lanes traveling in each direction. That allowed construction workers room to tear up and replace the old highway.

For those commuters who regularly use the Eisenhower it was a painful two years. Normally slow as molasses at peak rush hours even when the expressway is fully operational, traffic on the reduced lanes often drew to a total standstill. Construction workers got used to angry, frustrated motorists cursing them from the long lines of stalled vehicles.

Still, it was clear that the reconstruction was long overdue. By 1980 a large portion of the expressway had been in use for 24 years, and engineers were already drawing up plans for its rebuilding.

Almost since the day it opened, the expressway was pummeled each day by 180,000 vehicles, including endless trains of 80,000-pound semitractor trailers. The planners who designed the Eisenhower thought it would carry about 125,000 to 150,000 vehicles a day and that it wouldn`t reach that level until 1975. They didn`t foresee that the Eisenhower, rather than serving mainly to route interstate traffic quickly through the city, would instead be used about 75 percent of the time for local short-distance trips.

Neither did they foresee the explosion in the volume of truck traffic that the interstate system would generate. According to estimates commonly used in the mid-1950s, trucks would account for about 5 percent of any highway`s traffic volume. The construction of the interstates, however, led to a rapid growth of trucking so that trucks quickly replaced trains as the nation`s primary haulers of freight and now control 70 percent of the freight market. That means that instead of 5 percent, 32 percent of the vehicles on the highways are trucks.

And the sheer size and weight–up to 40 tons–of today`s trucks has had an impact that the original planners of the expressways could not have foreseen. Engineers have calculated that it takes 9,600 automobiles to do the equivalent damage done to a road by one 80,000-pound rig on just one trip.

Considering the volume and type of traffic on the Eisenhower and the extremes of Chicago`s weather, the road after more than 20 years had received a pounding nobody could have imagined. It had been given one major spruce-up in 1968, when it was smoothed out with a 3-inch topping of asphalt. But by 1984 it had become a buckled, potholed, bone-jarring obstacle course, a fate shared by much of the aging interstate system throughout the country.

It might be strange for middle-aged or older Chicagoans who remember watching it built to think of the city`s expressway system as aging and decrepit. It is perhaps even stranger for Chicagoans 40 years old or younger to try to imagine life without the expressways and the intricate interstate highway system that crisscrosses the nation. Next year will mark only the 30th year since the start of the interstate system, but in those three decades the system has radically changed the way Americans live. That we have the system at all is due in large part to the efforts of one man.

In 1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed a long-cherished idea of his–to build a vast 40,000-mile system of high-speed, limited-access superhighways that would link every urban center with a population of 50,000 or more in the contiguous 48 states. The president thought that the road network would encourage greater interstate commerce and provide jobs to tens of thousands of men in the construction industry, reducing a bothersome, rising rate of unemployment.

It was an idea that Eisenhower had had since 1919, when Gen. John J. Pershing, back from Europe after serving as commander of all the American forces in World War I, ordered a convoy of Army vehicles to travel across the U.S. from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. The trip was conceived mainly as a public relations stunt to show the nation the types of equipment and armaments American soldiers had used during the Great War and to demonstrate the need for a better national system of roads and highways.

One of the young officers ordered to lead the transcontinental expedition was Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Though the streets of the nation`s cities by that time were mostly paved, intercity roads were not, and most people traveling any distance between towns and cities relied instead on the nation`s extensive railway system. Eisenhower never forgot how the Army convoy of 1919, barely managing to average five miles an hour, took 62 days to cross the country along mostly unpaved, haphazardly laid-out dirt lanes.

Then came World War II, when Eisenhower, by then a general and the supreme commander of all Allied military forces in Europe, was stunned by the speed and ease with which enemy forces and war materials were moved across Germany against his troops. The Germans were using a network of high-speed, limited-access highways called the ”Autobahnen.” After coming into power, Adolf Hitler had ordered the system built in the 1930s as a means of putting men

back to work and stimulating the German economy. No doubt Hitler also foresaw the highway network as a powerful instrument of war, should that occasion arise.

By 1955 President Eisenhower perceived–correctly as it turned out–that a system modeled after the Autobahnen but much larger in scope would be a powerful shot in the arm for the nation`s economy. A soldier at heart who liked to do things through a chain of command, the commander-in-chief devising broad policies and objectives and subordinates doing the detailed planning and execution, he set forth the goals of his national superhighway plan and left it to his staff to find a way to finance and carry out the originally projected 13-year, $27-billion project. Not wanting to use existing general tax revenues or raise income taxes to pay for the highways, Eisenhower recommended that they be built as self-sustaining toll roads, though he said he would consider other means of financing.

Eisenhower`s formidable staff came up with a formidable plan. They quickly rejected the president`s proposal of building the interstate highway network as a system of tollways, convinced that American motorists would avoid paying tolls even if it meant traveling on older, slower and less-direct routes. Moreover, they dug up and dusted off a 1939 feasibility study for a proposed 14,000-mile national tollway system that had concluded that there was not enough transcontinental or long-distance highway travel in the U.S. to sustain such a toll system.

Instead, Eisenhower`s staff came up with an idea called the ”Highway Trust Fund,” whereby the $27 billion was to be raised by imposing new national highway user fees, such as a federal gasoline tax of 3 cents a gallon (later raised to 4 cents) and federal taxes on tires and on trucks used in interstate commerce.

Revenues raised by the new taxes were to be put into the trust fund and administered by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Separate from the government`s general revenues, the trust fund monies were to be parceled out by the FHWA to individual states so as to cover 90 percent of the cost of the highways, each state picking up the remaining 10 percent for portions of the system within its boundaries. The money was to be spent as the need arose, with no requirement that the FHWA seek congressional approval for each expenditure. Once the network was built–1972 was now projected as the completion date–the highways were to become the property and responsibility of the individual states, and the trust fund was to be liquidated.

Broad political support for the highway system was virtually assured when the plans revealed that it would cross 406 of the nation`s 435 congressional districts.

Initially the big cities put up powerful political resistance to the highway plan. Traditionally, America`s roads are built by state highway departments, which are controlled by rural-dominated state legislatures. Because they didn`t control the money and jobs that went into them, big-city politicians generally disliked state highway departments, and in 1955 neither did they like the idea of city residents paying gasoline and tire taxes to build superhighways through the rural reaches of their states.

Then they saw the plans for the interstate system. Of the 41,500 miles of highways on the federal drawing boards, 8,600 were to be in urban areas. Moreover, because land acquisition is more expensive in urban areas, about 55 percent of the $27 billion budgeted for the system was scheduled for the urban routes. That meant $15 billion of land-acquisition and construction funds would come under the control of the city politicians. So they, too, quickly lined up in favor of the interstate highway plan.

In June of 1956 Congress passed the necessary legislation to create the trust fund and launch construction of the interstate highway system. President Eisenhower signed the legislation with great fanfare. It was an astonishingly bold and popular plan.

By 1956 the American public was totally fixated on automobiles. In the first 10 years after the end of World War II automobile registration doubled in the U.S. Automakers, aware of this fixation, in 1955 introduced a startling array of sleek new cars with wrap-around windshields and powerful V- 8 engines, dramatic departures from the high, boxy, utilitarian autos being built before then. Simply by signing up for reasonable time payments, almost any American factory worker or secretary could drive around in a sporty new Chevrolet, Ford or Plymouth.

New-auto sales mushroomed from 5.4 million in 1954 to 7.9 million in 1955. Aware of how inadequate and unsafe the nation`s roads were for the surging automobile traffic, the average American was thrilled with Ike`s highway plan, especially since it included no increase in income taxes.

By coincidence it was also in 1956 that a major portion of a new highway was opened in Chicago, part of the Congress Street Expressway that had been started several years before. Stretching from the Loop to the suburb of Oak Park at the city`s western limit, it was completed in 1961 at a cost of $187 million in combined city, county and state funds (and the displacement of 25,000 families and hundreds of businesses, many of which left the city forever). Though built without any outlays from the new federal highway trust fund, that initial portion, now designated ”Interstate 290,” became one of the first segments of the new superhighway network. The trust fund, however, paid for additional sections of the expressway that were later built through the city`s western suburbs.

Eisenhower`s bold highway plan began to change the face of America in a way he had not anticipated nor wanted. In the summer of 1959, while being driven in a limousine from the White House to Camp David in Maryland, the president noticed an interstate-highway construction crew gouging a swath through the Washington, D.C., suburbs and, according to his aides, was alarmed when he found out the work was being done for his interstate system.

Eisenhower had never intended that the system be built into the urban areas, envisioning it instead as a network that, like the German Autobahnen, ran up to and around the nation`s cities without disturbing their established residential and commercial neighborhoods.

Almost immediately he called the director of the Bureau of the Budget, Maurice Stans, and when he learned that the details of the interstate system

–details he had till then ignored in his chain-of-command style–included 8,600 miles of urban highways, the president called a series of meetings with his transportation experts.

According to notes taken by his aides during those meetings, it is clear that Eisenhower was highly displeased that his highway system had become as much a city-suburban commuter road program as an interstate network. He said, according to the notes, that ”the matter of running interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes, that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way.”

Eisenhower worried that Americans, rather than using cheaper and more efficient trains and buses, were too dependent on urban expressways to get to and from work. To give a boost to mass transit, he suggested that cities ought to tax suburbanites who use their cars to come into town, noting that

”it was very wasteful to have an average of just over one man per $3,000-car driving into the central area and taking all the space required to park the car.”

The president ”stated his concern that too much of the interstate highway money might be going into connections in the cities.” After discovering, however, that the interstates probably would never have been built at all had powerful urban politicians not been given a big share of the highway funds, he sadly concluded it was too late to stop the extension of the highway system into urban areas.

In 1964 the Chicago City Council, whether or not it knew of Eisenhower`s unhappiness about freeways in urban areas, decided to bestow a rather ironic honor upon him. Four years after Eisenhower left the presidency, the council, by unanimous proclamation, renamed the Congress Street Expressway the Dwight D. Eisenhower Expressway.

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Eisenhower`s response was lukewarm.

Chicago reporters who sought him out for a comment found him vacationing at the El Dorado Country Club in Palm Desert, Calif. His brief statement, issued through a secretary, was, ”I am highly complimented by the action of the city council and the mayor and express my appreciation to anyone connected with this thought.”

Just one year short of celebrating its 30th anniversary, the superhighway system that Eisenhower dreamed of is filled with many ironies, most of which become obvious in tracing the history of the Chicago expressway that was named for him.

After almost 30 years, the interstate system still is not complete. Slightly more than 40,000 miles have been constructed out of the planned total of 42,500 miles. What has been built, however, is remarkably close to the system originally designed by Eisenhower`s highway planners.

The estimated cost was $27 billion, but the highway trust fund has actually collected and disbursed more than $100 billion to build 95 percent of the planned system. The remaining 5 percent, including a stretch along Florida`s western coast and several urban freeways, is scheduled to be completed by 1991, some 20 years after the original completion date, at an estimated cost of $20 billion. Meanwhile, some of the first interstate segments built almost 30 years ago have already succumbed to the ravages of old age and heavy usage. One such segment was Chicago`s Eisenhower Expressway.

To fix the Eisenhower, the entire road surface had to be removed. In some places the damage was so great that the road base and sub-base also had to be removed and totally rebuilt. Because the pavement being designed for the reconstruction was higher than the old one, seven of the bridges along the route had to be raised by several inches to maintain the 14-foot 6-inch federal height-clearance standard for highway overpasses. And considering the importance of the expressway to the life of the city and western suburbs, it had to remain open while the rebuilding took place.

In some states where interstate segments have had to be rebuilt, the entire sections have been simply closed to traffic. It is the fastest, cheapest way to undertake such a gargantuan project. For the Eisenhower, however, state highway engineers–much as they did for the Edens Expressway when it underwent a similar, even more extensive two-year rebuilding program in 1979-81–kept the expressway open during its reconstruction.

Luckily for Chicago motorists, new techniques and technology in road construction have evolved in the last 30 years.

Working only during the warm-weather months, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, the engineers and contractors in just two years finished rebuilding the Eisenhower from the ”spaghetti bowl” at Peoria Street on the west end of the Loop to its junction with Butterfield Road on the east end of Elmhurst.

In fact, thanks in part to a stipulation in the contract that gave the builders a performance bonus of $15,000 a day for each day saved on the construction, the work was finished a month early. Twenty years ago, according to the state engineers and the contractors who worked on it, the same project would have taken five years.

All the lanes on the new Eisenhower were opened for traffic in August. Only a portion of the Eisenhower Extension, running north from Butterfield Road to North Avenue, is incomplete. That portion, being rebuilt and widened from four to six lanes, is scheduled to be finished next year.

To the uninitiated eye of a motorist driving over the rebuilt expressway, the Ike, but for its being so much smoother, may not look like it has changed a whole lot. Indeed, come the morning and evening rush hours, traffic on it is just as jammed as it ever was. But the new road is in reality a ”state of the art” expressway, attracting engineers from around the country and around the world to see the changes.

Those changes start deep in the ground below the highway`s surface. Huge concrete catch basins, fabricated before construction began to save time, were installed under the road median. The catch basins prevent flooding during heavy downpours by quickly collecting the rainwater from the roadway. Connected to the basins is a new 6-inch-pipe underdrain system buried along the pavement`s edge to keep excessive moisture from seeping into the highway`s sub-base and thus reduce the risk of a base failure, which would cause the surface pavement to crack and settle.

Along the entire length of the expressway, a new 10-inch-thick concrete shoulder has been installed. The shoulder is ”tied” to the main pavement with steel rods below the surface. The tying process increases the weight-carrying capacity of the main road, further seals the surface by preventing moisture from seeping into the sub-base and eliminates a dangerous drop-off from the edge of the roadway onto the shoulder.

The concrete pavement is 12 inches thick, reinforced by a grid of steel bars 7/8-inch in diameter and spaced 6 inches apart, and topped by a 5 1/2-inch-thick layer of asphalt. It replaces the original 10-inch concrete pavement reinforced with a grid of steel rods 1/2-inch in diameter. The grid acts to hold the concrete together, slowing the process of cracking. Engineers discovered that the thinner steel bars previously used in road building couldn`t hold up against the tremendous weights of the vehicles that now use the busy expressways.

”There is so much steel in this road now,” says Edward Kolten, a resident engineer of the Illinois Department of Transportation who supervised some of the rebuilding, ”that what we actually have is something like one long continuous bridge.”

The concrete itself is injected with air, creating tiny bubbles within its texture that remain when the concrete sets. It is an additional means to control cracking: Should a tiny crack develop, it would travel only as far as one of the pockets and stop there.

The road surface was laid with computerized precision to give it, for instance, the precise angle at a curve that would provide optimum safety for autos rounding that curve at the prescribed speed limit. On the stretches where the road surface is not asphalted, the concrete surface is ”tined”: A machine cuts grooves into it that are 1/8-inch wide and deep. Spaced 3/4-inch apart, the grooves are designed to keep cars from hydroplaning during wet conditions.

The old steel barriers that ran along the side of the road and down the center medians have been replaced with huge tapered concrete ”Jersey”

barriers, so-named for the state where they were developed several years ago. Engineers had discovered that an auto crashing at high speed into the old steel barriers could be impaled on them. Against the new barriers, which are so deeply anchored as to be virtually immovable, a car in a similar crash would simply carom off them. The fact, however, that a car that is saved from impalement on a barrier could now, on bouncing off, crash into other cars speeding along the roadway illustrates a dilemma forever facing highway engineers: When they solve a problem, the solution often creates a totally new problem.

Such was the case years ago when, to eliminate visibility problems, high- intensity street lights were installed on poles along the most heavily traveled expressways. Visibility improved, but the light poles also became additional structures into which motorists crashed all too frequently. To solve this problem along the new Eisenhower, all freestanding light poles were removed from the sides of the highway and new ones installed on top of the Jersey barriers.

”When we resurfaced the expressway in 1968, we designed it for a life expectancy of 10 years,” says Kolten, ”but it actually held up for 16 years. This surface has a design life of 20 years, but it is a much, much stronger road than the old one, so who knows?”

Not only should the new Eisenhower be longer-lived, it should be considerably safer than the old. Most of its design features were also used in the reconstruction of the Edens Expressway, and in a survey comparing accident rates on the Edens during the four years, 1974 through 1977, before it was rebuilt and during the first four years, 1981 through 1984, after its reconstruction, the Department of Transportation found that accidents of all types on the new Edens dropped by 23 percent. Perhaps more significantly, wet-pavement accidents dropped more than 40 percent, as did collisions with fixed objects such as barriers and freestanding light poles.

So the motoring public now has a stronger, safer Eisenhower Expressway. The cost of its reconstruction is $150 million, nearly as much as its initial construction 30 years ago, when the bulk of the original building costs went for land acquisiton.

Palumbo Brothers Inc., a construction firm based in Hillside, was one of the firms that worked on the original Congress Street Expressway through the city in the mid-1950s. As luck would have it, the company, which from its old horse-and-buggy days has kept up

with the continuing advances in road construction, won the contract to rebuild the same section on Chicago`s West Side that it had built nearly 30 years ago. ”It was the same two-mile stretch,” says Peter Palumbo, head of the old family firm. ”But what cost $1.2 million back then cost $20 million this time around.”

(Continued in part two.)