I-294 Tollway Corridor Study

The Illinois State Toll Highway Authority (ISTHA) mission is to provide a safe system of highways and facilitate the free flow of traffic. During 2010, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the American Transportation Research Institute identified a segment of I-294 as the number one bottleneck among highways, crucial to the nation’s freight transportation system. This 22-mile corridor serves more than 300,000 vehicles daily. With the aim of providing congestion relief and addressing regional needs, ISTHA introduced a reconstruction and widening project and tasked Aecom and Urban GIS with providing data and insight for a study relevant to the project.

Our team began by converting and maintaining data from spreadsheets, CAD, and KMZ to GIS, which was later used to produce maps for internal/external communications, and ultimately served as a foundation for a robust and interactive GIS database. We worked closely with AECOM in managing ISTHA’s assets, Intergovernmental Agreements, environmental, geologic, and utility data. We also created a 3D data model of the subsurface and contribute to data input for a dashboard hosting close to 4000 soil borings. The 3D data model described the soil quality and helped in the engineering design.