In the private sector, when a big project goes more than 50% over budget and takes twice as long as promised, heads roll. For Illinois Democrats, however, it’s a cause for celebration.
And so it was earlier this month, when the notoriously delay-prone Jane Byrne Interchange was declared done at a ribbon-cutting led by Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
This spaghetti-like highway project near downtown Chicago forms the junction between the Dan Ryan, Kennedy and Eisenhower expressways, plus Ida B. Wells Drive. It was previously known as the Circle Interchange, and its (more or less) completion comes at a pivotal time for traffic in the metropolitan area.
The morning and evening rush of commuters is different than it was before the pandemic, and the main reason is obvious: Many people with jobs based downtown have taken to working from home, especially on Mondays and Fridays, and they intend to keep it that way in 2023.
As a result, traffic has gone topsy-turvy.
Drivers can sometimes sail into the city from the suburbs on Monday mornings, which would have been a dream come true before the pandemic. At the same time, lunch hours and Saturdays at some suburban chokepoints have turned into annoying and unexpected scenes of gridlock.
The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), which tracks these patterns, has found that drivers are taking trips on different days, at different times, and sticking closer to home than they used to. An analysis done for WGN-TV shows fewer trips being made at the familiar times and locations of rush hours. “Instead, they are more spread-out, making travel and congestion unpredictable,” WGN reported.
Another big factor in this traffic roulette is the continued rise of e-commerce. Amazon, FedEx and UPS trucks are everywhere, it seems, stopping-and-going, and sometimes blocking streets as drivers deliver online orders. CMAP reports that single-unit truck traffic (including those delivery vans) has shot up 20% since early 2020.
The third variable is public transit. Ridership on CTA, Metra and Pace continues to lag pre-pandemic levels, thanks in no small part to the perception that they are either unsafe, inconvenient or both, meaning more commuters are driving. As a result, motoring to and from downtown can be as rough as ever, especially on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, when employers are more likely to require the physical presence of their office workers.
While these patterns will continue to evolve in the years ahead, working and shopping from home are here to stay, and public transit has a long journey to win back its customers. Planners need to adjust accordingly, and that probably means re-engineering traffic systems.
The timing of traffic lights, for instance, could be revised to better accommodate the new patterns. Speed limits may need to be reduced as the latest safety hazards become apparent. The metropolitan area’s freight train congestion, a frustrating problem before the pandemic, needs to be resolved without worsening the new suburban “pop-up” traffic jams.
The timetables for maintenance and replacement of roads also need to be adjusted based on changing patterns of usage. Some previously quiet stretches are now getting wear and tear that must be addressed before giant potholes start swallowing up those ubiquitous delivery trucks.
Taxpayers, hold onto your wallets. If the Byrne Interchange project is any indication, adapting our highways and byways to today’s traffic could get very expensive.
Launched in 2013, the Byrne project was supposed to be completed about five years later, in June 2018, at a cost of $535.5 million. The latest estimate for the project is $806.4 million, more than 50% higher than the original price tag, and it won’t be fully done for months as work on landscaping, lighting, paving and painting will continue wellinto the spring.
So why did it cost almost $300 million more and take an extra five years? State officials cited problems in building retaining walls and long waits to relocate utilities, as well as surprises such as underground tunnels that weren’t abandoned as they had supposed. At one point, they also blamed the engineers they hired early on for failing to identify trouble with underlying soil conditions.
Well, there you go. Asked and answered. It’s certainly not the governor’s fault. It was that loose-living soil all along.
This project surely would have been on time and under budget, the myth goes, if only the dirt had cooperated. But let’s not forget to mention the state has enshrined union labor requirements. Taxpayers can rest assured that trade unions milked this one for all they could.
Mercifully, the Byrne Interchange is so central to the city’s transportation network, and it was so hazardous before the reconstruction, that even with office workers ghosting downtown, it’s still needed. And we like the safety improvements that mean fewer illogically placed exits, coming at you from all directions like video-game assailants, and more physical separation between lanes of traffic heading in different directions.
But as our public officials wake up to the tricky new reality of driving around the metro area, we worry about a future with bridges being built to nowhere, traffic bottlenecks in unexpected places that take years to be dealt with and, of course, the scourge of bad dirt rearing its ugly head again to cause massive delays and cost overruns.
Keep your eyes on the road — especially the upcoming completion of that long promised western entrance to Chicago’s O’Hare airport — and on your tax dollars.
