Ela Road, Cook County’s gateway to Lake County — but how is the shoulder on new pavement?

Cook County has finished repaving about 4 miles of Ela Road from Hoffman Estates to Inverness. And a repaved road is always lovely.

Especially Ela Road, a key gateway from far northwest Cook County into Lake County and its more open roads.

Ela Road has been popular among road cyclists for decades. It runs 8.5 miles from Central Road in Hoffman Estates, just north of the Jane Addams Tollway, all the way to Route 22 in Lake Zurich. The new pavement runs to Dundee Road.

Not far north of Lake-Cook Road, riders also can turn onto Long Grove Road and get to that pretty town.

Both Lake Zurich and Long Grove provide access to great roads like Old McHenry Road, Fairfield Road and Gilmer Road. Then you can ride to Wauconda (and make a nice big triangle), Volo, Fox Lake and all the Round Lake villages. Really, you can get anywhere in Lake County from there, including the Lake Michigan shore and the Wisconsin border.

Without Ela, our only options to ride to Lake County would be Old Sutton Road far to the west through South Barrington and Barrington Hills — or arguably Brinker Road just to the east — or unattractive throughways like Quentin Road, which doesn’t quite provide a safe passage all the way north, or Arlington Heights Road, which is far to the east and plenty busy with no bicycling infrastructure.

So Ela Road is like a magic passage for us in Cook County, providing opportunity for great rides. Sometimes it’s almost sad to take it back into Cook County.

The concern: shoulders

But the reality is, Ela has never been an official bike route.

It has no bicycling infrastructure. That’s why it’s best for serious cyclists, though with its lighter traffic, casual bicyclists have used it at least within their hometowns.

For Ela Road to be any kind of safe route to Lake County, we cyclists need it to have good shoulders.

It has them — mostly.

“When last paved 10 years ago, most of its shoulders were good for bicycles,” Inverness and Ela Road resident Bill Triplett wrote. “But there were spots not quite wide enough for comfortable bicycling with traffic. 

“These were spots where it narrows from slightly less than 3 feet to about 2 feet, and other spots where the shoulder is totally eliminated by concrete gutters.”

It’s true. And as Triplett pointed out, some of the shoulders, even where wide enough, were getting beat up with cracks and weeds.

But we still rode the road. Only during rush hours might Ela get really uncomfortable.

Ela Road as its own ride

Ela Road actually is a pretty ride itself.

It’s lined with trees, which form a canopy in some spots. And it passes nice real estate with good space and greenery.

Ela actually begins on the south end by running through the Paul Douglas Forest Preserve, up to Algonquin Road. There are even interesting homes embedded in the forest halfway to Algonquin.

Then you cross Algonquin into northern Hoffman Estates and Inverness, decidedly suburban. You pass fences and trees.

Dundee Road interrupts Ela, and you must take the former east to take the bridge over Northwest Highway. You often have a lot of traffic to contend with — and then you must get in the left-turn lane to proceed onto the ramp down to Northwest Highway itself. You have to take Northwest’s wide shoulder back to Ela.

There Ela Road resumes north through Barrington. You can turn west off Ela at Hillside Road to get to central Barrington, or you could turn east to Palatine via the Deer Grove Forest Preserve and its classic trail.

Ela continues to the county border at Lake-Cook Road, and soon you’ll go through the scenic Cuba Marsh, full of prairie and swamps.

Finally you enter Lake Zurich, and you must cross the busy intersections at routes 12 and 22 to get to that village’s downtown (with its new Main Street).

New, improved Ela?

So after the repaving in Cook County, how are the shoulder widths now?

“I wrote the Cook County highway department last fall asking to widen the shoulders to a 3-foot minimum and remove or move back the gutters to make the shoulder a consistent 3-feet minimum,” Triplett wrote. “They replied saying it would have 3-foot shoulders, but the gutters would remain.”

The construction was said to include curb and gutter replacement. Bicycling infrastructure was not in the plans. There no doubt would have been property issues to deal with, as many driveways and even forest run right up to Ela’s edge.

How about consistent 3-foot shoulders at least? Wellllll, the shoulder widths now look about the same as before: still varying.

Hardly a minute into riding north from Central Road, the newly paved shoulder appears to get a little thinner, even if only because of intruding grass and weeds.

Certainly after crossing Algonquin Road, the shoulder gets tighter. North of Freeman Road, the shoulder width definitely varies as driveways and gutters intervene.

It’s not until north of Baldwin Road that the shoulder seems to stay consistently 3 feet wide.

Then there’s the big Dundee Road/Northwest Highway crossing to contend with. After getting back on Ela, no longer newly paved, the shoulder slowly resumes — you kind of have to dart to it to avoid tight traffic.

Finally, once you reach Lake County, we have total relief. The shoulder becomes 5 feet wide and even becomes an official bike lane up to and a little past Long Grove Road.

It’s nice to have the new pavement in Cook County, to be sure, but cyclists will still have to keep their guard up with traffic as a result of the possibly thinning shoulders.

This video of the ride north takes a good look at it all while also providing a general view of the pretty setting Ela Road provides.

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