Another year of roadwork coming on I-90

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

ELGIN — Another summer of closed lanes and construction looms for motorists along I-90 — the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway.

The Illinois Tollway announced Wednesday that 27 miles of the Addams will be resurfaced from Barrington Road to the Elgin toll plaza, and from Hampshire’s Route 20 interchange to Genoa Road.

The work will begin in April and continue until about the end of the year. The workers also will rehabilitate 25 bridges on those two stretches.

Kristi Lafleur, executive director of the tollway authority, said that some lanes will have to be shut down during the work, but exactly how many and how long remain to be worked out during planning with the construction companies.

Also to be done will be engineering for a similar repaving of I-90 from Barrington Road eastward to the Kennedy Expressway. But that probably won’t actually be done until 2015, Lafleur said.

The $105 million projects are part of the authority’s Congestion Relief Program, or CRP, which began six years ago and has been cut back from $6.3 billion to $5.8 billion because toll revenues are running lower than expected.

The work being done “is sufficient to address pavement surface issues for the next five to seven years,” Lafleur said. But she warned that the need to do a more complete rebuild of I-90 — digging up the entire road down to the soil level and replacing it with new pavement rather than just replacing the top layer of asphalt — may be hard to put off much longer. The Jane Addams, then known as the Northwest Tollway, opened in the late 1950s and is the oldest part of the tollway system.

“The pavement on I-90 wil be undergoing its fifth rehabilitation, which is beyond industry norms and unprecedented on the tollway system,” she said. “By the end of the Congestion Relief Program, this pavement will be nearing 60 years old. (But) the tollway’s staff has done a tremendous job of maintaining the roadway and addressing the most pressing needs, and the upcoming work will allow us to continue to provide our customers with a smooth ride.”

Originally, this year’s part of the CRP was to have included $151.9 million for designing that complete reconstruction and widening of the Addams, though that work would not have begun until 2016 or later. But even the designing was cut out of the budget for this year.

“Clearly, we need to rebuild I-90 at some point, but we’ll be looking at a lot of scenarios, including adding (rail) transit along that corridor.”

She said the CRP is nearly 85 percent complete now.

Work done through the program since 2004 includes converting the 22 toll plazas to open-road tolling, reconstructing and widening I-90 with full-depth asphalt pavement from the Cherry Valley interchange to Rockton Road, extending the Veterans Memorial Tollway southward to I-80, and various rebuilding, widening and resurfacing projects on the Tri-State, Reagan Memorial and Veterans Memorial tollways.