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Editorials
Government really worked on Orchard Rd. : Editorials : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisGovernment really worked on Orchard Rd.
| 2/25/2010
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Motorists who frequent Orchard Road on Oswego's west side may have noticed the road is now a brighter place to drive.
Several weeks ago, contractors for the Kendall County Highway Department switched on overhead streetlights on the newly widened section of Orchard between U.S. Route 34 and the railroad overpass bridge just north of Mill Road.
The lights will no doubt serve to enhance the safety of the growing number of motorists who will use Orchard Road in the coming years. We're glad county officials had them included in the widening project.
County officials-especially County Engineer Fran Klaas and his staff at the county highway department-deserve praise for their work on the Orchard Road project. Once county voters approved a transportation sales tax in a referendum a few years ago to finance improvements to county-owned highways, the highway department moved as expeditiously as possible to widen and improve Orchard Road.
The widening project was virtually complete-minus the streetlights-by December, just as Klaas had said when the county board approved the contract for the project last spring.
These latest improvements to Orchard Road serve not only to significantly improve north-south traffic flow, they also move Kendall County closer to having four full lanes for through traffic on the entire stretch of Orchard Road, south of U.S. Route 30 and the county line. Now the only remaining section of the road that will one day need widening in Kendall County is the portion located between Route 34 and Ill. Route 71-including the bridge that spans the Fox River. Fortunately, however, the bridge, which opened to traffic in 2001, has been designed to accommodate the additional lanes.
But while motorists can now move more easily along Orchard Road in Kendall County, it is an entirely different matter north of Route 30 in Kane County where motorists continue to encounter daily backs-ups in what we like to call the Montgomery Bottleneck. That's the badly crumbling two-lane portion of Orchard Road located between Route 30 and Rochester Drive. Currently, Kane County is not expected to begin work to remove the bottleneck for another few years. For nearly a decade now, county officials have been citing a lack of funding to complete the project and we have no doubt their funds are indeed limited in the current economy.
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