There were two awful wrecks on Interstate 80 last week.
The first one, on Tuesday, was near Wheeler Avenue and blocked westbound traffic for hours. Photos showed cars and trucks off the road and someone getting loaded into an ambulance.
The Illinois State Police failed to provide any information on the crash.
The next morning, eastbound traffic was blocked following another accident. This time, the crash involved a motorcycle and a semitrailer, both of which burst into flames.
Once the fire was out, a charred semitrailer could be seen spilling its contents onto the roadway. The man who was riding the motorcycle was hospitalized with serious injuries.
Two accidents in two days, one right after the other. It's horrible and makes it easy to point at I-80 and call it a deathtrap that is worse than all the other interstates put together.
And now it is only going to get worse. Just a few days ago, the Joliet City Council went ahead and approved plans for a Love's Travel Stop on Briggs Street off I-80.
Not that it was easy. Mayor Bob O'Dekirk had to weigh in to get to the required six votes for three annexation agreements. And the mayor hardly ever votes. Back when he got the job, he made a big deal of saying he wouldn't vote at all unless there was a tie to break.
The last two mayors before him, Tom Giarrante and Art Schultz, who was in office for 20 years, voted on pretty much everything. But not Mayor O'Dekirk.
By not voting unless there was a tie, O'Dekirk explained, he was showing respect to the city council.
“I want to empower this city council,” O'Dekirk said when he was sworn in more than three years ago. “I want you city council men and women to set the agenda for the city.”
There was no tie Tuesday night and O'Dekirk could have respected the council by letting the Love's plan die with failed annexation agreements. But he must not have felt like empowering anyone that evening.
And the mayor jumping in to save the Love's plan at the last minute wasn't the only thing out of the ordinary that night. Warren Dorris, who is the pastor of Prayer Tower Church of God in Christ and was once a city councilman himself, showed up at the meeting with a memorandum offering him $100,000 to go along with the truck stop project.
Dorris lives near the the future truck stop and was against its construction.
“Everything could be made to Prayer Tower Church,” the memorandum said.
Dorris didn't take the money but it turned out the Love's people didn't need to give it to him anyway. They got enough land annexed into the city and now it looks there's no way to stop the truck stop, which is sure to draw trucks to it like moths to a light bulb.
Can I-80 handle any more trucks? We're already at the tipping point. More trucks will just make the road more dangerous. If you drive on an I-80 with any more trucks at all you may as well be taking your life in your hands and then using both hands to hurl your life down to the ground and then jumping on your life with both feet until your life is dead.
The only way to fix I-80 so everyone doesn't die is to start charging tolls to drive on it. There is no other way out.
Now, some might balk at the prospect of paying money to drive on I-80. They will just have to get over it.
After all, look at Interstate 355. It only costs $12 or so to drive away from the perils of I-80 up to Bolingbrook and back again. Not that you would want to go back again if you were able to escape I-80. It's a mere $12 round trip, and for that, you get a perfectly safe road where no one ever crashes and there are never any delays at all.
Tolls are the solution. Not just for making I-80 safe again but for so many things from which money can be made. Like sending children to school. And they will need to make money off these children so they can pay to put police officers in all of the schools in Joliet.
Putting a police officer in each school, including all the parochial schools, is expected to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.3 million for a year. That sounds like a lot but it isn't. The price of fixing the Route 30 interchange with I-80 alone is more than seven times as much. So putting police in all the schools is actually somewhat of a bargain.
And it would be so easy to raise the funds. They just need a school toll.
Each child could pay the toll in the morning on the way in and then again in the afternoon on the way out. Maybe $5 each way. For convenience they can tape an I-Pass to each student's head. Those police will be paid for in no time.
• Joe Hosey is the editor of The Herald-News. You can reach him at 815-280-4094, at jhosey@shawmedia.com or on Twitter @JoeHosey.