Fixing Illinois: Politics and Policy in the Prairie State

Chapter 6. Transportation: Maintaining Our Greatest Strength

ChaPTer 6 Transportation Maintaining Our Greatest Strength over the course of writing this book, we asked close observers of Illinois about the state’s greatest strengths, and our transportation infrastructure was most frequently at the top of the list. Though Illinois has long enjoyed a competitive edge due to its mature and diverse transportation system, that edge cannot be taken for granted as other U.S. hubs and other countries make major investments in their systems. A robust and efficient transportation system is critical if Illinois is to retain and increase its direct jobs in this sector, continue to provide businesses with the access they need to existing and emerging markets, and provide its citizens with mobility to get to work, school, shopping, and recreation. While the state boasts an extensive transportation network, much of it is old, deteriorated, and congested. Traditional highway user fees, which are a bedrock of road funding at the state and local levels, are for the most part stagnant or declining. Moreover, the five-year capital bonding program, enacted in 2009, is at an end. This chapter discusses these issues and presents some recommendations for dealing with them, most of which call for increased investment. 100 ChaPTer 6 Current Conditions The current network includes the following: • 2,300 miles of interstate highways, more than any states except California and Texas; • more than sixty mass transit systems ranging from small rural county systems to the nation’s second-busiest system in metropolitan Chicago;1 • the nation’s rail hub in metropolitan Chicago (“upwards of half” of all intermodal freight movement in the nation flow through the Chicago region);2 • 77 public airports, including O’Hare, one of the world’s busiest;3 and • more than 1,000 miles of navigable waterways.4 These systems are under the jurisdiction of a variety of entities: federal, state, local, special authority, and private. What the systems also have in common is that much of the publicly owned infrastructure is old and in need of repair and modernization for which current funding is inadequate. Take the case of state roads. Illinois owns and operates about 16,000 miles of highways, which collectively carry more than 55 percent of the state’s traffic.5 These roads are wearing out two times faster than they are being repaired.6 The backlog of bad roads on the state highway system is already 2,560 miles, or 25 percent higher than it was in fiscal year 1998.7 The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) projects that by the end of the 2018 construction program, the backlog will have nearly doubled to 5,047 miles.8 At that point, about one of every three miles (32 percent) on the state highway system will be in unacceptable condition. Figure 6 shows where the condition of Illinois roads is heading. At the current rate of repair, it will be forty years between repairs on existing roads—and roads are typically designed for a twenty-year life. Bad roads cost money. They cost motorists money in terms of higher vehicle operating costs—roughly $292 per motorist per year according to TRIP, a national transportation research group.9 They cost businesses money, driving up the costs of consumer goods and driving down the attractiveness of Illinois as a business location. Finally, when a road repair is deferred, the road’s condition worsens. The American Association of State Highway and Transit Officials estimates that $1 spent on repairs while a road is still in “fair” condition can prevent costs of $6 to $14 to later rebuild the same road once it has deteriorated.10 101 Transportation: Maintaining Our Greatest Strength Although local roads carry less traffic than do state roads, the local systems together comprise more than 124,000 miles and touch the lives of every citizen.11 A portion of the receipts from the state motor fuel tax (MFT) provide the only ongoing source of state funding for local roads. Whereas road maintenance costs have risen sharply, 2012 MFT receipts distributed to cities, counties, and townships12 were actually 13 percent less than they were in 2007.13 These local governments also receive revenues from the local property tax for streets and roads. Transit in metropolitan Chicago provides far more than 600 million trips per year.14 The extensive asset base includes more than 1,400 miles of track, 900 bridges and viaducts, 2,300 train cars, and...