On January 30, 2013, Governor Pat Quinn and Illinois Transportation Secretary Ann Schneider announced nearly $50 million in Illinois Transportation Enhancement Program (ITEP) grant awards. The City of Champaign’s Windsor Road Complete Street Project was one of 54 projects awarded an ITEP grant. The full amount of the City’s grant award is $1,740,800.
The Windsor Road Complete Street Project will reconstruct the ramped approaches leading up to IDOT’s new Windsor Road bridge over Interstate 57. Work will occur over two years. This year, 2013, the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) will construct the new bridge, which will have six-foot bike lanes and five-foot sidewalks on both sides of the structure. IDOT plans to start their project the first of April and be complete by the first of November. Windsor Road will remain open throughout the bridge reconstruction project with the aid of temporary traffic signals, which allows one lane of traffic across the bridge. In the spring of 2014, the City’s project will close Windsor Road, between Briar Hill Drive and Fields South Drive, and reconstruct the approaches leading up to the new bridge to add bike lanes, sidewalks, and streetlights. It is anticipated that Windsor Road should be reopened to traffic by August 2014.
The ITEP grant program is a federally-funded, competitive program that encourages transportation-related enhancement projects in a variety of categories. The program is designed to promote and develop alternative transportation options, including bike and pedestrian travel, along with streetscape beautification. The federal funds are awarded competitively, and any local or state government with taxing authority is eligible to apply. Local matching funds are required, and work must begin on the projects within three years. The last ITEP grant the City of Champaign received was in June 2006, when the City received $328,000 to add landscaping enhancements to the new Curtis Road interchange. For the current round of funding, IDOT received 328 applications requesting ITEP federal funding totaling $327 million. For a full list of ITEP projects, please visit www.dot.state.il.us/opp/itep.html