One good Lake County road for serious cyclists will be closed off in spots again this year as two new roundabouts will be built, with a new bike path included.
The pretty Darrell Road between Island Lake and Lakemoor, west of Volo, already saw a new roundabout installed at Case and Neville roads in the fall of 2023. The Lake County Division of Transportation is reminding us that the next phase of the Darrell Road construction, north of the existing roundabout, will happen this summer.
As LCDOT says in its Facebook post and as the project website says, Dowell Road will be realigned to join Darrell Road at a new roundabout, and a roundabout will be added at the intersection with Fisher Road.
The project includes a new bike path from the Darrell-Case-Neville roundabout north to Fisher Road. It’s being said that some of this new bike path will be part of the Grand Illinois Trail, but it appears that larger plan will come later. Officials in a 2021 meeting said the Grand Illinois Trail would come from the west out of McHenry County. They also said the new path would at some point connect to the Singing Hills Forest Preserve to the east. Clicking below will take you to the trail map shown during the meeting.
For now the focus is on the roundabouts. Those of you who ride in the area know that there’s no off-road path on Darrell now, except for the one at the Case-Neville roundabout basically to help us get through it. It ends quickly afterward.
But that would change once construction is done, with the path extending to and through the Dowell and Fisher roundabouts. You can see how the full trail would look in this animation shown during the 2021 meeting; clicking below will take you straight to the animated aerial view.
The aerial animation is also posted separately on the project website. You can also see satellite views of the stretch of Darrell Road in question, with a magnifying glass to provide closer looks of this year’s phase. The project home page also provides neat before-and-after sliders of the satellite views.
So the bike path ultimately will run between the three roundabouts — from Case on the south and Fisher on the north. No paths will extend along Case, Dowell and Fisher really much beyond the roundabouts. And once you go north of Fisher, the bike path will end.
That will leave us bicyclists back on the Darrell Road shoulder to keep riding toward Lakemoor and Volo. If you’re comfortable on more rural roads with traffic, that’s not really so bad, as it hasn’t been for years. Darrell Road provides nice scenery of varied farmland with trees to break it up. And the traffic is pretty light, though I haven’t ridden on it during real rush hours.
Yet despite the animations showing several people walking or riding on the path, it’s hard to imagine many casual bicyclists from the Island Lake or Lakemoor communities using those paths to ride along Darrell Road. Lily Lake Road still might be more comfortable for getting between the two towns. The Fisher Road roundabout could help some ride to the Volo shopping area a little more safely.
I’d be happy to be corrected if bicyclists in the area are looking forward to the roundabouts. As you might guess, the many comments responding to LCDOT’s post reveal widely varied and often passionate views, though most of them are about driving.
In the meantime this summer, we serious road cyclists will be ready for the detours, expected to last 140 days.
* Top photo comes courtesy of the Lake County Division of Transportation.
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