The Village of Oak Park will replace the pavement of 12 alleys in the village this year, according to Oak Park Village Engineer Bill McKenna.
The alleyways scheduled for work are scattered throughout the village, but five of them are located in the blocks between Madison Street and Jackson Boulevard, according to a map of the planned work provided by the village. The village board approved more than $2.5 million for this year’s projects last month, according to board documents.
In total, the project will update the pavement in 17 total alley segments across the village. Some alleys are T-shaped, and comprise multiple alley segments, McKenna said.
Updating the village’s alley’s is a core goal for the Public Works Department and is enshrined in the village’s budget for at least the next 5 years, McKenna said.
“This is a pretty standard project for the village,” McKenna said.
It takes about three weeks to rebuild each alley from scratch, he said. McKenna hopes to have this season’s work done by the end of July.
The village only began supporting maintenance of its alleyways in 2002. Since then, it’s been working through updating them year-by-year. Oak Park has over 600 alleys, most of which were built in the 1930s, McKenna said.
“There was kind of a long backlog of work that needed to be done prior to 2002,” he said. “Generally, every year we’re inspecting alleys around the village and prioritizing them based on pavement condition.”
The village uses the Pavement Condition Index system to evaluate its alleys’ conditions, with a 100 on the index meaning that the pavement is in perfect condition and a zero on the index meaning it’s basically rubble. McKenna said the Oak Park alleys getting worked on this summer all score around a 40.
“They’re in pretty bad shape,” he said. “After those scores we start looking at other factors like drainage so we can evaluate them appropriately.”
The village still has a way to go before it has modernized all its alleyways, most of which are now nearly a century old, McKenna said.
“We still have 10 to 15 years left of alley replacements,” he said.