For the next three weeks, the Illinois Department of Transportation aims to solicit feedback from the public on the Southwest Connector — a highway expansion project that would further connect the southern part of the state to the outskirts of the Metro East.
As part of a planning and environmental linkages study, state transportation officials plan to evaluate potential improvements, like reducing travel times, enhancing safety, improving freight movement and connecting communities, along the highways that run from Waterloo to Murphysboro.
“We want to accommodate what the public wants for their transportation network,” said Carrie Nelsen, the transportation agency’s program development engineer based in Carbondale. “We want to know what the problems are so that we're using our money wisely to solve the transportation problems in our region.”
Building off the work already completed, IDOT’s $6 million study of the rural expressway marks some of next steps for the massive project, which has long been a priority of downstate leaders, that some have estimated to cost $1 billion.
Transportation experts hope to gather more feedback from the public about community needs and how to reduce the environmental impacts of the project along the route that follows the corridor of Illinois Routes 3, 154 and finally 13/127.
“We're trying to get that together, gather that information and use that to make informed decisions on what's the best transportation improvement,” Nelsen said.
IDOT also hopes the feedback could both inform immediate projects that could be started even before the study concludes and larger projects that will need to be submitted for a federal review process.
Because the project is so big, stretching across more than 70 miles of roadway, Nelsen said IDOT will parse some of the suggestions with “working groups,” which will flesh the ideas out further.
“We're going to break them into smaller groups, introduce these concepts, work with these working groups to improve upon the concepts and, then again, come back to the public with what we found,” she said.
The section of Southwest Connector from Murphysboro to Pinckneyville is closer to seeing construction than Pinckneyville to Waterloo because IDOT has already completed environmental assessments and the first phases of their engineering documentation for that section, Nelsen said.
Currently, IDOT has plans to expand the road between Murphysboro to Pinckneyville to four lanes and build bypasses around Pinckneyville and the small village of Vergennes.
As of now, there is no official cost estimate for the project, Nelsen said, because the Southwest Connector is still being formulated. Expanding a two-lane road to four lanes could cost $5 million to $10 million per mile, Nelsen said.
The decades-long idea has the backing of the congressional delegation that represents the area covered and a variety of civic and economic development organizations, Spectrum News reported last year.
A task force of state lawmakers, IDOT employees, various county officials, organized labor groups and other civic leaders endorsed the idea of creating a four-lane roadway between southern Illinois and the St. Louis metropolitan area in 2019.
This study, which is funded equally by state and federal dollars, is expected to conclude in 2027 after other public meetings. This phase of collecting feedback will end on Aug. 18.
Comments can be submitted via an online survey, sent by email to contact@southwestconnector.com or mailed to the Illinois Department of Transportation’s office in Carbondale.
