Eye On Illinois: Exhaustive report on infrastructure projects worthy of study

Whatever you might think about the Illinois Department of Transportation, you cannot accuse it of being anything less than thorough.

On Friday Capitol News Illinois reported on IDOT’s rollout of the annual update to its six-year infrastructure project plan. The current projection is $41 billion for work in all 102 counties, from walking paths to airport runways and all things in between.

“More than half of the plan, $27 billion, will go toward road and bridge projects, including $4.6 billion in the current fiscal year,” Peter Hancock wrote. “That will fund repair and reconstruction of 2,866 miles of roadway and 9.8 million square feet of bridge deck on the state highway system, along with another 738 miles of roadway and 1.1 million square feet of bridge deck in systems maintained by local governments.”

Those numbers are staggering on their own. That 2,866 miles is longer (by 70 miles) than the drive from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York, to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The Sears (don’t call it Willis) Tower has nearly 4.5 million square feet of floor space, not even half the amount of bridge deck to be repaired in a single fiscal year.

If you find the macro numbers interesting, a dive into the micro details is fascinating. Visit tinyurl.com/IDOT2023 to see the department’s landing page for its Multi-Year Improvement Program. There are summaries, maps and guides, a “data driven decisions tool” explaining the project selection process and easily digestible fact sheets for each of the nine IDOT districts.

For example, District 3 (Bureau, DeKalb, Ford, Grundy, Iroquois, Kankakee, Kendall, La Salle and Livingston counties) has 1,687 highway miles and 787 bridges that account for 10.8 million miles traveled per day and should see a $1.2 billion improvement investment through fiscal 2029.

A few more clicks yields an 85-page document covering only District 3. Obviously not everyone gets excited reading about a standard overlay on 1.98 miles of Kempton Road (Ford County Highway 9) from the county line to Illinois 115, a $600,000 project, and it’s hard to envision even the most ardent civil engineering types going line-by-line through every page, but the fact this data is presented and easily accessible makes it possible for anyone with a computer to obtain quality information.

IDOT isn’t breaking new transparency ground, but neither is this degree of divulgence the baseline standard across state agencies, and we’re all better off with more information. This particular dataset will be useful for explaining why “all gas tax money goes to Chicago” is a flawed talking point, but that’s just one reason to spend some time exploring.

The government works for us, with our money, to maintain our infrastructure. Learning how it all happens is time well spent.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.