THE BEST THING TO DO WITH SOME INFRASTRUCTURE IS WAIT FOR IT TO DECAY.

There are some stroads that are so gorged on rent-seeking that it's pointless to put them on a road diet.  (The specific example under discussion is Ogden Avenue through Naperville.)

There is going to be no impetus to turning this into a road; you'll be fighting all these strip mall tenants and owners who are making a living mining the public investment in roadway capacity for their own gain. And it's not like the configuration here lends itself to it easily becoming a street—that would require an enormous amount of commitment and capital, and for what?

So, why are you obsessing over this particular stroad? It's like we're saying "anyone can improve their health" and you are pointing to the chain-smoking, obese, diabetic, octogenarian and saying you see no hope.

That octogenarian might be a walking example of "look how long I got away with breaking the rules" although the prudent person might not want to generalize from that experience.  The five-lane stroad with lots of budget-built strip mall buildings will run afoul of creative destruction, mostly as destruction, sooner rather than later.  (Yes, even in Naperville.  Taxes, crime, corruption, and corona tyranny will have their way.)

Most American cities have a stroad like this one. Those strip malls aren't designed to last more than a couple of decades. Same with the frontage roads and everything else. I think the most likely outcome for such places is that they rot away and nobody cares. If you want to fix this stroad, work on making your neighborhoods better places to live, naturally shifting people from auto trips to walking and biking, and then put the momentum and energy you create doing that into resisting calls to prop up the development along this corridor with tax subsidies and other public bailouts.

These are bad investments that never should have been made. The best thing that can happen is that they die a natural death and, in doing so, create a minimal amount of harm to the community. That's ultimately how this is fixed.

The more likely outcome, though, is that when the businesses go through the cycle of decline (boutique stores become resale shops, banks become check cashing offices, the warning signs of downscale retail (TATTOO, TAN, NAILS) proliferate, some public official will hope for a tax increment arrangement or get the stroad written into the next infrastructure porkulus, and the chronic wasting of the community goes on and on.