Business leaders from Lake and Cook Counties have asked the Illinois Department of Transportation to speed the proposed widening of Half Day Road between U.S. Highway 41 and Illinois Highway 83.
Tentative plans call for the widening of the highway to at least four lanes from two beginning in four to five years.
But members of the Transportation Management Association of Lake-Cook have told state Transportation Secretary Kirk Brown that would be too long to wait for construction.
Earlier this year, the General Assembly earmarked $1 million to begin an engineering study on Half Day Road, which also is Illinois Highway 22. Officials estimated that the study, along with land acquisition and other steps necessary before construction could begin, will take up to five years.
Illinois 22 is one of Lake County’s most heavily traveled east-west highways. Bill Baltutis, executive director of the Transportation Management Association, said that up to 26,000 vehicles travel the highway every day and that by 2010 daily volumne could reach 30,000 to 40,000.
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The Transportation Management Association is a private business organization representing 60 corporations, developers and chambers of commerce in northern Cook County and southern Lake County. It is dedicated to seeing that the transportation needs of those businesses, and the estimated 32,000 people they employ, are met.
Association representatives recently met with Brown and a number of state legislators from Lake County in Springfield. Although no commitments were made, Baltutis said the transportation secretary promised to meet with the group in 30 to 60 days to discuss a revised schedule for the highway widening.
Attempts to reach transportation officials for comment Thursday were unsuccessful because of the Veterans Day holiday.
A speedup of the project likely would anger opponents of the highway widening. Mayor Barbara La Piana of Lincolnshire said Thursday that she and other village representatives talked to aides of Brown last summer and urged that the whole project be put on hold.
La Piana said that improvements to Lake-Cook Road and the projected extension of Illinois Highway 53 into central Lake County could make it unnecessary to widen Half Day Road.