The stretch of U.S. Route 6 between Channahon and Joliet has long been a problem area, and Will County and the state are seeking the public’s input on how to fix it.

Representatives from the county’s transportation division and the Illinois Department of Transportation held a public meeting at Joliet Junior College on Thursday laying out the project area.

A stretch of two-lane road between East Frontage Road in Channahon (near Channahon Fire Protection District Station 2) and Terminal Court is the focus.

This approximately five-mile, two-lane stretch of road is in between longer stretches where Route 6 is a two-lane four-lane divided highway, creating a brief bottleneck.

“You’ve got four lanes to the east,” said Christina Kipkowski, a phase one project engineer for the Will County transportation division. “You’ve got a newly improved four lanes to the west from the interchange. Now you’ve got this section that’s two lanes.”

Kipkowski said the county needs more information from people who drive the road, because the county has all sorts of data that gets pulled from surveys, crash reports and traffic studies, but there are certain things that aren’t quantifiable by pulling a data set.

This is all part of phase one of the project.

Phase one is essentially the planning before the planning phase, where IDOT and Will County looks at what the community’s needs and conducts preliminary engineering and environmental studies.

“You know, I could have drainage issues, or there could be an intersection that has a lot of near misses, and we can’t quantify near misses because you don’t call the cops for a near miss,” Kipkowski said. “Intersections that have near misses can be just as dangerous as ones that have a lot of crashes.”

Will County shared a heat map of crashes on the road, which showed the intersection of Houbolt Road and Route 6 as a problematic location. There have been 172 crashes in the study region between 2019 and 2024.

Two of those crashes were fatal, and seven were considered to have caused incapacitating injuries.

For the Village of Channahon, crashes are more of a concern near the Interstate 55 interchange.

“When you look at Route 6 and Bradley and the Thomas Dillon Drive intersection, I know there are some concerns among citizens with how many u-turns are there,” said Channahon Police Chief Adam Bogart.

“It’s very close to a residential area on the north side of Route 6, so we want to make sure citizen safety is being looked at as they develop the project further,” he said.

Assistant Village Administrator for Channahon Mike Petrick said a study on this stretch of road was done 20 years ago, though it didn’t lead to any project.

In a way, he said, it could be best that those construction projects didn’t come to fruition. The region has grown so much in that time that the original plans might not have suited current needs.

“There’s some areas where people slow to make a left turn that stops all traffic behind them, and that can sometimes cause rear-end accidents,” Petrick said.

“It certainly hinders traffic flowing through the area, same with the crossing of the railroad tracks near Youngs Road, especially tanker trucks that have to stop for the crossing,” he added. “The more delays you have, the more impatient people get, and the more impatient they are, the more aggressively they’ll drive, and there’s more likelihood for an accident.”

Traffic is expected to increase in the area between now and 2050, according to a study conducted by IDOT.

The area is already seeing increased truck traffic because Route 6 and the roads around it have many, many industrial centers and distribution hubs.

The completion of this project is relatively far off. A chart provided by IDOT at the meeting said it’s expected phase one should last through 2028.

There will be two additional public meetings, the first of which is expected to be in spring 2027 and the final of which will be in fall 2028.

After those meetings, the project is expected to enter phase two, which is where plans for construction and land acquisition would begin. Phase three is the construction phase.

To provide feedback on the project, or to see the materials shared during the meeting, visit https://www.willcountyus6study.com/. All documentation provided during the meeting is available there, including exhibits, the project brochure, and the public meeting comment form.