Illinois Tollway - 187 Miles of Driving Pleasure
- davidwilson100
- Apr 7
- 5 min read
On November 21, 1958, a new fast highway between Hillside and Aurora opened. In conjunction with the newly opened Congress Expressway the route provided a non-stop highway between Chicago and the connection with the Lincoln Highway extending west across Illinois.
The new highway was called the East-West Tollway, part of the 187-mile highway system known as the Illinois Tollway that opened in the fall of 1958. What was (and is) the Tollway, how did it come to be, and what has been its impact?
Automobiles began supplementing and then replacing horses and buggies at the beginning of the 20th century. Steady improvements and price reductions of the new-fangled “gas-buggies” made them useable for more people and for more purposes. The 1923 introduction of all-weather closed cars caused an explosion in automobile use, particularly for access to downtown Chicago. Public officials searched for ways to alleviate the massive traffic congestion that grew year after year. More and wider streets and roads became clogged as fast as they were built.
A new solution came in the form of multi-lane, divided “super highways,” that were separated from cross-traffic that had interrupted the smooth flow of traffic. Highway planners soon planned a series of new super highways that would radiate from downtown Chicago, and in one case route traffic around the city.
Out and around the towns along the Q, highway planners, particularly in DuPage County, envisioned a series to 200-foot-wide roadways. Butterfield Road, angling southwestward between Chicago’s West Side and the Fox River near Aurora, was planned as a prime corridor for improved traffic movement. Regionally, a “Three States Boulevard” was conceived to route traffic around, not through, Chicago, through the states of Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.
The East-West Tollway, that part of the Illinois Tollway system in the vicinity of the towns along the Q, incorporated two concepts, neither of which was new. One was limited access (no cross streets) divided (directional lanes divided by a median); the other was a roadway paid for by user fees.
Limited access and divided roadways were both employed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, originating with carriageways in big urban parks, giving rise to the term parkways. In 1907 New York’s Bronx River Parkway emerged as the prototype for super highways two decades later. User fees, in the form of tolls, had been used as early as the 1790s on the Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike. Locally, tolls had been charged in the 1850s on the various plank roads radiating from Chicago, including the plank roads that extended through the towns along the Q between Chicago and Naperville.
As plans for new super highways accelerated in the late 1930s, the question arose as to how to pay for the new highways. In 1919, the State of Illinois had imposed a three cent per gallon motor fuel tax to pay for highway construction and maintenance. That method continues to be used right up to the present day.
In the late 1930s, traffic experts didn’t believe that super highways would not attract enough volume for tolls to pay for the projects. The 1940 opening of the toll-financed Pennsylvania Turnpike proved the experts wrong. Tolls easily covered maintenance costs as well as paying off the revenue bonds issued to provide construction money. Ohio and Indiana followed suit, opening cross-state toll roads in the mid-1950s.
After World War II, super highways, by then known as “expressways” were being planned throughout Chicago. Projects already underway were to be financed through motor-fuel taxes. Inflationary pressure and the sheer size of projected regional highway projects called continued motor fuel tax financing into question. Could regional expressways be paid for by issuance of revenue bonds financed by toll collections as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana had done?
Debate over appropriate funding mechanism for present and future planned highways was settled with a compromise, whereby city expressways would be funded with motor fuel taxes and the proposed regional highways to be financed with revenue bonds to be paid for by tolls. On July 13, 1953, an act of the Illinois General Assembly created the Illinois State Toll Highway Commission. In October, 1955, the Commission issued $415 million in Northern Illinois Toll Highway Revenue Bonds to fund the construction of the Northern Illinois Toll Highway, consisting of the present day Tri-State, Northwest, and East-West Tollways.
Conceptual routes were designated, but more debate arose over the specific alignments and whose land would be taken for the wide rights-of-way. Some planners sought unsuccessfully to lower right-of-way acquisition cost by routing the highway through existing Forest Preserve land. By late 1956, disputes and lawsuits had been settled, and construction got underway. The first segments of the new Illinois Tollway system opened in late 1958, comprising 187 miles of limited-access highway.
The tollway system introduced innovative “over-the-highway” restaurants that not only catered to travelers’ needs, but became family dining destinations in their own right. The Oases were run for the first fifteen years by the Fred Harvey organization that had achieved fame with the Harvey House restaurants and dining cars on the Santa Fe Railroad beginning in 1878, then by Howard Johnson’s for another nine years. Since 1984, dining options have been provided by fast-food restaurants. All of the original Oases have since been demolished. Three “over-the-highway” Oases remain but the original structures have been replaced.
Opening of the new roadway system prompted a metamorphosis of adjoining communities. Bucolic farmland and the little village of Utopia at the junction of the Tri-State and East-West Tollways, was transformed into Oak Brook, a conglomeration of retail and commercial activity. Through the subsequent decades similar development occurred at a variety of highway interchanges.
The early concept was for the Tollway to charge tolls until 1973 when the original construction bonds had been paid off. The popular descriptive phrase was “Toll Free in ’73.” But in 1968, the Illinois General Assembly replaced the Tollway Commission with the Illinois Toll Highway Authority, with the expectation that tolls would continue to be charged in the future.
“Open Road Tolling,” introduced early in the 21st century, replaced the bins where each traveler stopped and tossed coins for toll payment, eliminating the resultant long traffic backups. Additional lanes have increased capacity. The Northwest and East-West Tollways have been renamed the Jane Addams and Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollways respectively, commemorating historic persons who lived along the routes long before the tollway system was opened.
New segments, the Veterans Memorial Tollway, and the Illinois Route 390 Tollway were added in 2009 and 2016 respectively. In the sixty-seven years since the original tollway opening, the system has expanded to 306 miles extending throughout Northern Illinois.
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