QUIZ ANSWERS

1. The photo is an aerial view of the Murray Baker Bridge, which carries Interstate 74 over the Illinois River in Peoria. PHOTO: I-74 Murray Baker Bridge over the Illinois River, Peoria, 2005. IDOT Aerial Surveys Section – Remote Sensing Unit
   
    
2. B) Interstate 57. I-57 runs 358.57 miles from the Illinois-Missouri State Line along the Mississippi River near Cairo to the Dan Ryan Expressway (I-94) in Chicago. The runner up is I-55, which runs 294.38 miles from East St. Louis to Lake Shore Drive (U. S. Route 41) in Chicago.
   
    
3. C) Successful Insurance Broker. Daniel B. Ryan was a successful insurance broker who was also a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners from 1923 until 1961. He served as President of the Cook County Board from 1954 until his death in 1961.
   
    
4. 
   

   Expressway	Honoree’s First Name	Interstate Highway Number(s)
   Kennedy Expressway	John	I-90 / I-94
   Dan Ryan Expressway	Daniel	I-90 / I-94
   Reagan Memorial Highway	Ronald	I-88
   Borman Expressway	Frank	I-80 / I-94 (Indiana)
   Kingery Expressway	Robert	I-80 / I-94
   Eisenhower Expressway	Dwight	I-290
   Stevenson Expressway	Adlai	I-55
   Edens Expressway	William	I-94
   Bishop Ford Expressway	Louis	I-94

   
   
   
5. Cofferdam Excavation is, according to the IDOT Glossary of Highway Construction Terms and Definitions, “When the department specifies the construction of a bridge pier in or adjacent to a stream the contractor is required to drive sheet piling into the stream, creating a cofferdam. The mud and additional stream bed material that must be excavated prior to the construction of the pier is called cofferdam excavation.”
   
    
6. A, B, C and D. The bridge is named for Murray M. Baker (1872-1964), who was the first vice president of the company that eventually became Caterpillar. Baker convinced the Holt Manufacturing Co. to move to Peoria in 1909. Holt merged with C.L. Best Gas Tractor Co. and became Caterpillar in 1925. Baker was also a founder of the Baker-Hubble Dairy, now Prairie Farms. He also owned the first car dealership in Peoria, which sold Maxwells and Electric autos. Among his many philanthropic efforts was a $150,000 donation to Bradley University for a new business college building.
   
    
7. D) Interstate 90. I-90 stretches 3,020.54 miles from Seattle to Boston. The runner up is I-80, which runs 2,899.54 miles from San Francisco to Teaneck, New Jersey.
   
    
8. D) William G. Stratton. In 1953, the General Assembly, at Stratton’s behest, created the Toll Highway Commission and empowered the Commission to issue $459 million in bonds for tollways. The Commission was renamed in 1968 and is now known as the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority.
   
    
9. FALSE. This is a myth according to an article by Logan Thomas Snyder in the June, 2006 issue of American History magazine and noted interstate historian Richard F. Weingroff in an article in the May/June, 2000 issue of Public Roads magazine. As related by Snyder, “Aside from the fact that, according to Weingroff, "no law, regulation, policy, or sliver of red tape requires that one out of every five miles of the interstate highway system be straight," it is virtually impossible from an engineering standpoint. The NHDS is composed of nearly 50,000 miles of road, meaning that almost 10,000 miles would need to be straight and level to conform to the supposed one-in-five-mile rule, a figure that is wildly unrealistic. In addition, from an aerial standpoint, an airstrip every five miles is superfluous, given the speed at which modern aircraft travel. Although there are long and level stretches of highway that could function as an emergency landing strip in a pinch, they are nowhere near as evenly parceled out as the one-in-five-mile rule would suggest. (The use of highway infrastructure for an airstrip is not unheard of, however: Nazi Germany did use limited stretches of the autobahn for such purposes during World War II.)”
   
    
10. C) Illinois Department of Public Works and Buildings, Division of Highways
    
     
11. D) 62 Days! The convoy left Washington on July 7, 1919 and arrived in San Francisco on September 6, 1919.
    
     
12. B) The Crosstown Expressway. A favored project of Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s Mayor from 1955 until 1976, was the subject of intense local opposition. Plans to build the Crosstown were shelved soon after Daley’s death in December, 1976.
    
     
13. C) 55,311 bridges.
    
     
14. A Roads for Land Swap. Roosevelt’s idea was that the new systems cost would be offset by purchasing (or condemning) much more right-of-way than really needed for building the roads themselves. (FDR once anticipated a one-mile wide right-of-way.) The money for road building would come from the sale or lease of the excess right-of-way land to businesses that would benefit from being near the highway, such as gas stations, hotels, restaurants, etc.
    
     
15. B) Interstate 190, which is only 3.07 miles long, runs from the Kennedy Expressway (I-90) to the entrance to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The runner up for the shortest Illinois interstate is Interstate 280 at 8.21 miles long. I-280 runs from the Iowa State Line on the Mississippi River to Interstate 74 near Colona in Henry County.
    
     
16. C) 29.4%.
    
     
17. B) 332,400 vehicles per day.
    
     
18. A) 2,000 vehicles per day.
    
     
19. C) Illinois Route 5.
    
     
20. C) The “Minutemen.” The late Erv Hayden, a Chicago Police Sergeant who provided traffic reports from a helicopter and which were broadcast over Chicago radio station WGN was responsible for naming the patrol, “The Minutemen.” He had noted that, from his helicopter, that whenever there were accidents or other problems on the expressways, it always seemed that an ETP vehicle was on the scene “within a minute.”
    
     
21. A) EPV (Emergency Patrol Vehicle) Program. Begun in 1968, the EPV program has assisted over 500,000 motorists along the interstates of Madison, St. Clair and Monroe counties in the East St. Louis metropolitan area.
    
     
22. B) The Fox Valley Freeway.
    
     
23. B) The City of New Orleans. The song was of the same name and sung by Arlo Guthrie.
    
     
24. C) 1967. The last link from Illinois 7, west of Joliet to U. S. Route 30 near New Lenox, was opened to traffic on October 15, 1967.
    
     
25. D) Interstate 55.
    
     
26. 
    

    Term / Name:	Location / Refers to:
    “Circle Interchange”	Convergence of the Kennedy, Eisenhower and Dan Ryan Expressways and Congress Parkway near downtown Chicago.
    “The Junction”	Where the Edens Expressway (I-94) splits off from the Kennedy Expressway (I-90 / I-94) near Montrose Avenue in in Chicago.
    “Hubbard’s Cave”	Long tunnel which carries the Kennedy Expressway beneath Hubbard Street and railroads northwest of downtown Chicago.
    “The Mile Long Bridge”	I-294 Bridge between the Stevenson Expressway and LaGrange Road (U S. Route 12 /20 /45) Southwest of Chicago.
    “The Avenues”	Stretch of the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) in the western Chicago suburbs where the cross streets are in numerical sequence (1st Avenue to approximately 25th Avenue).
    “The Spur”	Interstate 94 segment connecting the Edens Expressway (I-94) to the Tri-State Tollway (I-294) in North Cook County.
    “The Hillside Strangler”	Convergence of the Tri-State Tollway (I-294), The Reagan Memorial (I-88) Tollway, and the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) near Hillside, Illinois.

    
    
     
27. The late State Senator Vince DeMuzio (D – Carlinville) was the honoree and for whom the Expressway is named. Mr. DeMuzio served as a State Senator from 1974 until his death on April 27, 2004, after waging a heroic personal battle against colon cancer. The Vince DeMuzio Expressway follows Interstate 55 from 6th Street in Springfield to Illinois Route 108 in Montgomery County.