Irving Park to Schaumburg Commute (Chicago, Rolling Meadows: home, neighborhood, living)

[Namita]

Hi All,

My husband's new job is in Schaumburg. We were wondering if anyone has any experience with this commute... Is it faster since it would be going away from the city? What time does traffic get bad - rush hour?

What is Irving Park like as a neighborhood? It is safe?

Thanks for all your help!

Namita

[MannheimMadman]

Paging Drover..

In my experience, the commute sucks. Every other Monday I commute from Albany Park towards Schaumburg on I-90, around 6:45/7 AM. It sucks. The traffic generally crawls until you pass O hare. Then it gets a bit better.

I live in Albany Park, which is directly north of Irving Park. There are some beautiful properties west of the expressway in the Old Irving neighborhood. Otherwise along the Montrose and Irving corridors, it's pretty meh. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not very pretty. What made you consider Irving?

[jdiddy]

Schaumburg is an awful city which is an absolute hell trying to commute to from Chicago.

[Drover]

In some ways it's worse because you have the express lanes working against you. My wife does this very commute. It depends where exactly he'd be working; my wife works right by the mall. She sometimes works off-hours (such as every weekend) and on those days it takes her 25 minutes to get there. During peak times, it can take 40 minutes to over an hour-plus, depending on weather conditions or if there's been an accident. Traffic crawls from downtown all the way out to Harlem, at which point it starts magically flowing for some reason. Then sometimes it starts bunching up just past the toll booth as 4 lanes merge into 3. Once past the elimination of the 4th lane, it flows again.

What really sucks is the commute home, because then you're fighting airport traffic into town. Fridays are the worst; travel times can approach 90 minutes. Coming home on Fridays, the wife usually ends up getting off at 190 toward the airport, uses the Manheim cloverleaf to reverse course inbound, then gets off at Cumberland, and then takes a strategic combination of surface streets. That's how dedicated she is to avoiding the Kennedy and the approach thereto on Fridays.

If you don't already live in Irving Park and you're looking for a compromise between downtown and Schaumburg, I'd recommend living further up the Blue Line/expressway, such as Jefferson Park or Oriole Park. That way you still have access to the Blue Line or Metra, but you'd also be past most or all of the bumper-to-bumper traffic outbound and would have less of it to fight inbound.

[quigboto]

It's a nightmare. The "reverse commute" is a myth. I drove from Rolling Meadows to Humboldt Park a fre weeks ago and it took 2 hours and 20 minutes because it was raining.

[jdiddy]

I don't really understand why the reversible lanes still function as they do. I believe I remember reading the traffic counts are almost similar - yet if you are commuting into the city daily, you have Metra and 2 Park-n-Ride CTA lots to use as traffic alternatives. Those commuting outbound rarely have public transit to rely on.

Yet the reversibles always flow inbound in the morning and outbound in the afternoon.