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player ready...Thursday afternoon’s snow blast turned Chicagoland highways and byways into parking lots, canceled more than 75 flights at area airports and pushed some evening commutes past the four-hour mark.
“Travel times were awful,” said Matt Smith, the spokesman for Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation. “Other cities would shut down, but we did what we could do.”
`Efforts included the deployment by 2:15 p.m. of the city’s full fleet of 269 snow-fighting trucks and the salting of streets even before flakes fell, Smith said.
“We don’t usually presalt, but we wanted to get every advantage we had,” he said, aware that many drivers would question the effort’s success. “Whether you’re on an expressway or on one of our arterial streets, you are not going anywhere fast in this weather.”
By rush hour, travel periods on area highways looked like times from a marathon. Two hours and 15 minutes from the I-290 junction on the Dan Ryan Expressway to I-80–and that was using the express lanes, according to the official Web site for the Illinois Department of Transportation.
Traveling on the Edens Expressway from Lake Cook Road to the I-290 Circle required 4 hours and 10 minutes at 7:30 p.m.
It took Anthony Walker, 45, more than 3 hours to get to his house in Homewood from Schaumburg, where he was working Thursday afternoon. He has made that trip in a little more than an hour in normal weather. Walker left Schaumburg about 3 p.m. and didn’t get home until 6:20 p.m.
As Walker drove I-294, I-290 and I-90 to get home, most of the other drivers on the road seemed cautious, slowing down to account for the slick conditions and low visibility, he said.
But a few didn’t.
“You still had some people who think they can cut into your lane that think you can stop like you would on dry pavement,” Walker said.
In Northbrook an Amtrak train bound for Milwaukee hit a car that apparently slid through railroad gates on Shermer Road about 8:40 p.m. No one in the car or on the train was injured, according to a witness on the train.
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