Illinois Tollway
toll company
The Illinois State Toll Highway Authority (ISTHA) is an administrative agency of the U.S. state of Illinois charged with building, operating, and maintaining toll roads in the state. The roads, as well as the authority itself, are sometimes referred to as the Illinois Tollway. The system opened in 1958 in the Chicago area, and has subsequently expanded to include the eastern and central sections of Interstate 88 (I-88) extending into the northwestern part of the state. Beginning in 2005, the system was reconstructed to include more lanes and open road tolling, the latter of which uses I-Pass transponders to collect revenue as vehicles pass antennas at toll plazas or designated entrance or exit ramps. As of 2017, ISTHA maintains and operates 294 miles (473 km) of tollways in 12 counties in Northern Illinois.
History
The original Toll Highway Authority was established in 1941. After construction of the first toll highways in Illinois was delayed by World War II, the Illinois State Toll Highway Commission was established in 1953. The first three toll highways in the Chicago area were all planned, constructed, and opened in 1958 under the authority of this Commission. These first three toll highways are the present day Jane Addams Memorial Tollway (I-90/I-39/US 51), the Tri-State Tollway (I-94/I-294) and the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway (I-88, between Hillside and Sugar Grove). The first segment to open was the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway between Devon Avenue and Elgin on August 20, 1958 at 3 p.m.
“Illinois Tollway” enters the record as toll company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Illinois, Tollway and toll can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Illinois Tollway” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Illinois, Tollway and toll provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1071617. Authority coordinates are 41.806, -88.051. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1958, 2005, 2017 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Illinois Tollway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.