Comment EI-23049
Received or sent (printed as 5/30/2016)
[Winnetka] Objections to the environmental impact of the 47-mile Illiana Expressway were similar to those now being raised against the 278-mile Great Lakes Basin Rail (GLBRR) Line: It is a new-terrain transportation corridor disrupting or displacing thousands of residents and businesses, splitting farms, interfering with wildlife, and encouraging the flight of industry from compact urban cores to sprawling new exurban developments. These are valid arguments against both projects. However there are powerful counter-arguments for the redundancy of allowing interstate freight shipments to avoid disruptions to the existing core networks, and reducing the risk of exposing more concentrated populations to exposure by accidental spillage there. To a lesser extent because of its shorter length just between I-55 and I-65 Illiana provides redundancy for trucks avoiding the I-80-94 and US-30 routes across the south suburbs in the same manner as the rail line does for trains. Drawing trucks off those existing highways reduces the risk of exposure from accidental spillage to so many people adjacent to those routes as would rerouting trains off the existing Belt Railway in Chicago. So the straight east-west segment of the rail line between US-45 in Illinois to I-65 in Indiana on an alignment most logically shared with Illiana should have sufficient width for construction of the Expressway parallel to the railroad tracks if Illiana is resurrected at some time in the future. This would avoid the economic, social and environmental impacts of building the road on its own right-of-way. Duplicate right-of-ways always have many more negative impacts as well as ultimate construction expense than to have one single, albeit wider, combined right-of-way for the proposed rail bypass and a possible highway link. A joint road-rail right-of-way would be a more powerful impetus for intermodal freight facilities to ameliorate concerns of impacted communities over loss of taxable farm land. And to reiterate the earlier point: A combined road + rail corridor bypasses more freight, some of it flammable or toxic, away from more heavily-populated areas within Chicago-Gary-Hammond urban core areas. None of the GLBRR right-of-way through the “collar” counties around Chicago and outlying areas of Lake and Porter Counties may be considered as invading “pristine” open space. Original forests were cut down as long as two centuries ago to create farmland, some of which has subsequently been converted from rural to urban use. The metropolitan area of nine-million people has created an aura of urban impact that cannot be reversed merely by stopping this or that infrastructure project. So the trade-off is not between economy and the environment, but rather of competing human uses of local agriculture versus essential infrastructure for an increasingly globalized economy dependent on expeditious movement of transcontinental freight. It is the reduction of hazard associated with such cargoes to millions of people that tips the balance towards the Surface Transportation Board’s approval of the GLBRR bypass around Chicago-Gary-Hammond.
Submitted by: Bill Stremmel · Winnetka, IL
The Board publishes this comment in its environmental-comment table for this proceeding. It is quoted here as printed; nothing is inferred from it, and it states the commenter's own position in their own words, not this record's.
Permanent address docketyard.org/d/FD-35952/comment/EI-23049 · back to the docket sheet