Drive into the suburbs west on I-290, then a few miles north on Illinois Highway 53, and you’ll eventually pass a small yellow sign saying “All traffic must exit” and then another sign saying “Freeway ends” and – finally – a long left-hand curve, and – boom – no more expressway.
To the north – where it seems like the expressway should have continued – is, instead, a wide swath of unoccupied land. Your tax dollars have paid for much of this land, which the Illinois Department of Transportation has been buying up through the years with the intention of extending Illinois Route 53 towards Wisconsin.
For decades, people have proposed this Route 53 extension as a way to alleviate the bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic on the large east-west thoroughfares such as Lake-Cook Road and Half Day Road.
But also for decades, residents in the path of the highway – and officials in the string of towns it would run through – have challenged the highway plans, questioning both the overall need for it, and the environmental impact it would have on the grasslands and bogs that cover much of the area.
All that time, IDOT kept buying more land, and the Illinois Tollway conducted studies, formed committees, formed a “Blue Ribbon Advisory Council” with community members, and did three separate environmental studies on the area.
“What I think of is a long, long battle,” says Joe Mancino, former mayor of Hawthorn Woods – one of the communities that would have seen the highway run through some of its residents’ back yards.
“People … came together and discussed their commonalities and their differences,” Mancino said. “It brought government entities together with the community where they can hear them directly. It educated the community on the environment and what bad planning or good planning can do for them.”
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And the result of all of those meetings and debates was that, in 2019, the Illinois Tollway announced that it would not complete the third environmental study for the highway because of financial constraints and a lack of support from officials in Lake County.
In essence, the plans for the Route 53 extension were dead – or, at very least, on life support.
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But that came after your tax dollars paid for all of those studies and all of that land. Here’s a rough accounting of the public money spent toward the nonexistent highway, which NBC5 Investigates obtained through public records requests:
Land acquisition - $ 54,300,000.00
Environmental study (done in the 1990s) - $ 9,000,000.00
Another environmental study (done in the 1990s and 2000s) - $ 6,600,000.00
Feasibility analysis – done in the 2010s – $ 3,190,000.00
Land use study - $ 823,000.00
Third environmental study (done in the 2010s) - $ 13,000,000
TOTAL SPENT TO DATE: $86,913.000.00
So: Was it a complete waste of taxpayer money? Or is there some justification for an $86 million road to nowhere?
Mancino’s opinion might be surprising: “I think some of the folks out there want to think that it wasn’t money well-spent, but I think it has been money well-spent,” he said.
He points out that -- because of the environmental studies and the resulting community input, the state is now considering turning the project into a possible greenway, overseen by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, which would connect to the Des Plaines River Trail.
And that, Mancino said, may not have happened, had all the expensive studies not been done, and had therefore not revealed the environmental challenges that changed so many minds.
“There is so much more optimism now amongst those proponents for the environment,” Mancino said. “They realize they have a governor who is willing to look at it, and is actually putting some expenditures towards studying it. Everybody has become more informed, more educated – therefore more optimistic.”
Plans for a greenway are not 100% certain, however. There is a technicality to work out, in that all the land that IDOT bought is still officially designated to build a highway.
However, when NBC 5 Investigates contacted IDOT about the project, the department’s answer, though vague, appears to now support the idea of a greenway:
“IDOT looks forward to continuing the work with IDNR and our local partners to determine next steps regarding any transfer of land,” the IDOT statement reads. So perhaps there will be some lemonade made from lemons, after all.
