The Route 30 Bypass at 60

Mostly, Denny Lee remembers trucks. Lots and lots of trucks that would drive through the village of Montgomery’s small downtown area in the late 1950s.

The trucks would slow traffic through the downtown, which was already congested because of the hundreds of cars that would drive up and down River Street as workers would make their daily commutes to and from the massive Western Electric plant that stood along the west bank of the Fox River at the terminus of River Street.

This was the Montgomery that Lee, a lifelong village resident and 1962 East Aurora High School graduate, can recall before the construction of the U.S. Route 30 Bypass.

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Bypass, known today simply as Route 30. The highway extends about nine miles west from Route 34 to Route 47 along the Kendall-Kane county line.

Lee gave credit to Aurora Mayor Paul Egan for the Bypass’s construction. He said Aurora was experiencing the same problem with truck traffic in the city’s downtown, albeit on a larger scale than Montgomery in the late 1950s, and Egan successfully lobbied state lawmakers to construct the Bypass just south of the city to relieve the problem.

Though state highway engineers chose to route the Bypass through the village, Lee said village residents at that time did not object.

Referring to the Bypass Lee said, “It definitely benefited the village because of the truck traffic problem. It took a lot of the truck traffic out of our downtown. And it also helped the village and Oswego grow. Back then, there was just a whole lot fewer people around. Aurora had only about 50,000 people, we (Montgomery) were about at 4,000 and Oswego was smaller than that. Oswego was considered a real small town.”

The Bypass also served to enhance Montgomery and northeastern Oswego Township’s status as an industrial and manufacturing center for the Fox Valley area and the western suburbs. In addition to the Caterpillar and Western Electric plants, other large nearby manufacturers flourished in the years after the highway’s construction. Those firms included Processed Plastics, Allsteel, Lyon Metal and Anchor Brush. Combined, those and other firms provided thousands of manufacturing jobs within a one-mile radius of the Bypass and Route 31 interchange.

Besides relieving the truck traffic in Aurora and Montgomery, Roger Matile, director of the Little White School Museum in Oswego and a longtime Record Newspapers history columnist, said the opening of the Bypass had immediate practical benefits for area businesses and for residents of the then developing Boulder Hill subdivision south of Montgomery.

The Bypass, he said, provided easy access to jobs at nearby plants for Boulder Hill residents and access to the nation’s growing highway network for manufacturers such as Caterpillar and Western Electric.

Matile also noted that until the Bypass opened, the only traffic access point into and out of the Boulder Hill subdivision was off Route 25 at Boulder Hill Pass to Saugatuck Road.

Matile said he believes the state and local officials who advocated for the construction of the Bypass and gathered to celebrate its opening 60 years ago this month, would be astonished by the business and population growth that has occurred along the highway’s corridor over the past six decades.

“When it was planned and built the right-of-way ran largely through undeveloped farmland,” Matile said. “And with the completion of the interstate highway system shortly after the Bypass was finished, the amount of heavy traffic on Route 30 diminished substantially. But as development in the collar counties funneled west along the Route 34 corridor into northwestern Kendall County, the Bypass was there to help handle the steadily growing volume of cross-river traffic.”

While, one by one, the large manufacturers have either shut down or pulled up and left the Montgomery area, large retail centers have sprung up along the Bypass at Route 34, Douglas Road and at Orchard Road. And Oswego and Montgomery both have extended their boundaries to reach the Bypass in an effort to boost their sales and property tax revenues and to better control development.

Lee noted that today, there are more people living in Montgomery off the Bypass west of Orchard Road then there are living in the entire older area of the village east of Route 31. All of those homes west of Orchard Road have been built since 2000.

All that population growth on Montgomery’s far west side, however, has resulted in daily traffic backups and sporadic road rage incidents west of Route 31, Lee said.

To remedy the problem, Lee said village officials are continuing to lobby state lawmakers and the Illinois Department of Transpiration to widen the highway to four lanes from Route 31 west to Route 47.

Referring to the former Bypass, Lee said, “It’s got to go to four lanes. People are cutting each other off out there and the backups are real bad, especially at Orchard Road.”

Asked if there was any downside to the Bypass’s construction, Matile said, “It encouraged growth – some would call it sprawl along the highway from Route 34 to Route 47 that changed the character through which it passed.”

Another negative, Matile said, is the state failed to align the Bypass with the existing Route 30 and Route 34 intersection to create a single four-way intersection.

“It created a confusing and often dangerous off-set intersection – a problem that exists to this day,” Matile said.