Meanwhile at the headquarters of the Illinois Department of Transportation, officials gather in the War Room.
Jill: Those pesky Oak Parkers, they just keep coming back to our public meetings about adding lanes to the Ike. We can’t shake them. We do the meetings in Hillside. We do them in the afternoon. We’ve even turned the meetings into this hilarious “show-and-tell” charade instead of formal presentations so that no one can pin us with that “they only want to add lanes” charge.
Bob: But we do only want to add lanes. That’s the only idea we’ve ever seriously considered. Isn’t that why we wear these “Four Lanes Rule” buttons under our lapels?
Keith: Don’t go flashing that button. Someone might see.
Jill: I’m so sick of hearing about how we can’t expand “the ditch” through Oak Park. Their quaint little library. Their quaint little conservatory. It’s our damned ditch. We should just pull a Meigs on them and blow up Harrison Street in the middle of the night.
Ethel: I know they’re annoying, Jill, with their holier-than-thou, let’s-help-the-poor-West Siders-get-jobs-in-Oak Brook-and-let’s-build-a-train-to-get-them-there crap. If poor people want a job they should just buy a car and drive to it like everybody else. But we’ve got to out think those Oak Parkers, especially that David Pope guy with his four-syllable words and that earnest expression. He never met a sentence that he couldn’t double. But we can’t get defensive. We get defensive and we look like stooges from the road builders lobby.
Bob: Do you guys remember that old man at the last meeting? He was between the woman with the plan for a coal-powered moped fleet and the bug-eyed Oak Park guy, what’s his name? Kuner. Yes, Kuner. Mr. Multi-Modal. God, he annoys me. But anyhow, there was this old man who had a chart on a poster board about buses. This guy loves the buses. I think he rides all day and chats up the drivers.
Jill: So, more buses. We bury them in buses. We’ll make them run on natural gas, that’ll get us a chit.
Keith: But not just any buses. Express buses. They’ll zoom you from the Loop to DuPage County in no time.
Ethel: Not on the creaky old three-lane Eisenhower they won’t. We need to add an Express Bus Lane. And, Bob, I think I see where you’re going with this. How do we add the Express Bus Lane!
Bob: We rip out the Blue Line! It’s obsolete now that we have Express Buses!
Jill: Pure genius. We pour more concrete and wipe out the competition in one fell swoop.
Keith: No way we pull this off.
Ethel: Maybe we do or maybe we don’t. But if we tie up the daisy-eaters from Oak Park for the next five years fighting to keep the Blue Line they’ve got instead of pushing it out to Broadview and Elmhurst and Oak Brook then we’ve won. The do-gooders declare victory because they saved the Blue Line. And we’ve contained mass transit so we have more money to build more roads.
Jill: And what about the fourth lane on the Eisenhower?
Ethel: Oh, eventually we’ll get it done. You get past the Maze Library and it’s just a bunch of bungalows.
