News Updates

A path to a climate resilient transportation system in northeastern Illinois

Our transportation system is already feeling the effects of climate change. While the region needs ambitious, coordinated action to reduce and combat climate change, we’ll still be experiencing flooding and higher temperatures in the coming decades. But we can prepare and invest in the system to make it resilient to those impacts.

In partnership with regional stakeholders, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) created the Transportation Resilience Improvement Plan (TRIP) to identify vulnerabilities in the regional transportation system and highlight how to make it more resilient to extreme weather and climate change.

TRIP provides a roadmap to inform transportation planning and decision making throughout the region. It meets the Federal Highway Administration’s Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-Saving Transportation (PROTECT) Program requirements for a resilience improvement plan — and will help position northeastern Illinois to compete for PROTECT funds as well as other resilience funds.

How vulnerable is northeastern Illinois’ transportation system?

The TRIP vulnerability assessment found that flooding is the biggest climate-related risk to the transportation system. It impacts all transportation modes and can damage physical assets, disrupt operations, and threaten user safety.

And it is expected to worsen in the future. The frequency and intensity of extreme rain is expected to increase, with the maximum daily amount increasing by more than 20 percent by late-century. While these rainfall increases may seem insignificant, even a fraction of an inch can wreak havoc on our stormwater systems. This is especially true for the 100-year storm, a flood event that has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring in any given year.

Our region’s transportation system is not prepared: About a third of road miles studied and roughly half of bus and train stops are at high or very high risk from flooding.

Extreme heat is also a major climate concern. By midcentury, the number of very hot days — those with an average temperature at or above 95 degrees — is expected to be nine times higher than what we’re used to.

Extreme heat can damage infrastructure (such as cracked pavement or rail buckling) and impact electrical services and backup power. It also poses a particular risk to people, including transportation users and outdoor workers who keep the system running. Those who depend on transit face risks from extreme heat, as they lack transportation alternatives and often walk to and wait outside for transit. More than half of bus and train stops have high vulnerability to extreme heat for waiting passengers.

How can we make the system more resilient?

TRIP identifies 21 project resilience strategies — a collection of structural, nature-based, and hybrid tactics that can increase flood or heat resilience. Many strategies can also improve air and water quality, support habitat and biodiversity, deliver cost savings, foster economic development, and improve quality of life. This is particularly true for nature-based solutions, like green infrastructure.

Nature-based strategies

• Create a natural high-flow bypass
• Implement natural revetments
• Install stormwater detention facilities
• Install swales and infiltration practices
• Manage streams to reduce erosion and overtopping
• Provide shade trees along trails, sidewalks and at transit stops
• Reconnect river floodplains to increase flood storage
• Recycle greywater on site
• Restore, enhance, and create wetlands
• Use flood buyouts in flood-prone areas
• Use permeable pavements and grass medians

Structural strategies

• Elevate bridges
• Elevate or relocate roadways
• Implement transit tunnel flood protection measures
• Improve or deepen drainage ditches
• Install flood walls to prevent flooding of roadway
• Install geotextiles on embankments
• Install shade structures and shelters along sidewalks and at outdoor transit stops
• Upgrade rail infrastructure, particularly interlockings
• Upgrade or install culverts and other stormwater management infrastructure
• Use cool pavement technologies

Finally, TRIP highlights 25 organizational resilience strategies that CMAP, partner agencies, and stakeholders can adopt to insert resilience into common decision-making practices:

• Build partners’ capacity to implement resilience strategies
• Embed resilience goals and strategies in policy-based planning documents like long-range transportation plans and asset management plans
• Incorporate climate projections and adaptive design principles into project development and design
• Provide guidance for partners to update design and development standards

Where can we make the system more resilient?

TRIP highlights 64 projects identified by partner agencies and evaluated by CMAP to prioritize investments that increase the transportation system’s resilience. By being identified in TRIP, these projects are more competitive for national PROTECT grants and eligible for a reduced cost-share.

CMAP further refined the project list to identify the 20 highest priority projects to help the agency and the region focus their support for potential project funding and coordination.

Implementing TRIP recommendations

CMAP plays a lead role in coordinating plan implementation, along with key partners in the transportation, stormwater, and emergency management sectors. In the near-term, CMAP will continue to collaborate with implementers, improve access to TRIP’s vulnerability assessment data, and assess opportunities to integrate resilience strategies into the agency’s work. Currently, CMAP is incorporating TRIP’s recommendations into the 2026 Regional Transportation Plan.