It’s a typical weekday afternoon at the intersection of Route 53 and Laraway Road, 40 miles southwest of Chicago, and semi-trucks thunder by in a steady stream.
They start at the sprawling warehouse complexes on the fringes of Joliet, rumble alongside the fading polyester petals of a roadside memorial for someone who died in a truck crash and roll past the ballfields where youth teams play, carrying goods for Amazon, IKEA, Walmart, Target and Dollar Tree.
In the next 10 minutes, 150 trucks will pass through the intersection. If you lined them up end to end, they would stretch more than two miles.
Three decades ago, this area was mostly prairie sprinkled with quiet subdivisions. But the early 2000s ushered in the age of online shopping. Then came the rise of next-day delivery. America’s retailers needed warehouses, fast, and the area outside Chicago — flush with interstates and rail lines — was perfect.
Few places in the nation have been transformed so completely so quickly. Since 2000, retail giants and developers have erected more than 146 million square feet of warehouse space in the Chicago area — equivalent in size to roughly 1,400 Home Depot stores.
The warehouses have brought new jobs. Still, people who live nearby say what has happened around them is a cautionary tale for other communities hoping to cash in on the warehouse boom.
On average, roughly 20,000 trucks pass through Joliet, pop. roughly 150,000 people, every day. Most keep to Interstate 80, but as many as 6,400 — more than five times as many as before the warehouse boom — use local roads and state highways.
They pummel roads, belch fumes and batter the pavement, contributing to road damage that requires millions
