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Circle Interchange work to begin

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Illinois

* Well, at least one huge Illinois bottleneck will finally be alleviated. From a press release…

The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) project will reconstruct the interchange at the heart of Chicago that links the I-90/94 (Dan Ryan Expressway) to the south, I-290 (Eisenhower Expressway) to the west, Congress Parkway to the east and I-90/94 (Kennedy Expressway) to the north. According to estimates by transportation planners, the improvements will reduce traffic delays by at least 50 percent, save drivers five million hours annually and the improved traffic flow will lead to a savings of 1.6 million gallons of fuel per year. […]

The Circle Interchange was constructed between 1958 and 1962, and has outlived its original design life. The Federal Highway Administration and the American Transportation Research Institute identified the Circle Interchange as the number one bottleneck among highways crucial to the nation’s freight transportation system. Of the more than 400,000 vehicles that use the interchange each day, about 33,000 are trucks. The interchange experiences an average of 940 crashes per year.

The traffic volume is almost mind-boggling.

* NBC Chicago…

Thousands will be affected during construction. The end result, Quinn said, will be a minimum of four lanes in each direction on I-90/94 at the I-290/Congress Parkway, two lanes on the “north-to-west” and “east-to north” ramps to improve safety and mobility, and local access lanes for both northbound and southbound I-90/94.

Ramps also will be reconfigured for a safer, more efficient traffic flow.

IDOT this summer considered changing plans for the interchange’s renovations after neighbors complained proposed ramps would be too close to their windows.

* Sun-Times…

In stage one, which will begin in two weeks, crews will begin work on the Morgan Street bridge. Over the next six to eight months, crews will begin work on Halsted, Harrison, Peoria and Taylor streets, and on the contested north to west flyover ramp over Halsted, which will connect drivers to the Eisenhower.

In 2016, crews will begin work affecting the majority of expressway drivers: reconstructing the main lanes of traffic on both the Dan Ryan and Kennedy Expressways, as well as work on Van Buren, Jackson, Adams and Monroe.

Three lanes will remain open on the Dan Ryan and Kennedy, while two lanes will be open in each direction on the Congress Parkway and Eisenhower.

Much of the work will be completed at night to minimize traffic delays, officials say.

Discuss.

posted by Rich Miller
Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 10:39 am

Comments

Good!! That north to west off the Dan Ryan to the Eisenhower is absolutely brutal, and I will get off and take side streets just to avoid it.
Hopefully is will not be another “Hillside Strangler” fix that moves the traffic jam a mile down the road. Remember the “elect me Governor and I’ll get rid of this traffic jam” billboards. Another election-another time!!

Comment by train111 Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 10:46 am
Nothing like coming back from a relaxing Michigan summer weekend on a Sunday night and trying to get from the Ryan to the Ike. It’s a parking lot once you hit Mac Place.

I generally avoid the whole spaghetti bowl mess by bailing at Cominskey and picking up the Ike at Ashland. Saves a lot of time and stress.

Comment by wordslinger Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 10:49 am
Smart man, train, lol.

Comment by wordslinger Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 10:50 am
Hopefully IDOT uses the same engineers who redesigned the Dan Ryan a few years ago. The extra lane (in spots) and the reconfigured on and off ramps make the Ryan the best rush hour drive in Chicago — by far.

Comment by Teddy Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 10:53 am
Hope they include some bike lanes.

Comment by Dan Bureaucrat Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 10:55 am
This is a long over due repair. I drive it 3 times a week and it’s always jammed up. They should also look into the building the Cross Town
Expressway.
It used to called the spaghetti bowl after it was built, and although it’s has been tweaked it never has been right.

Comment by Mokenavince Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 10:58 am
For me the problem is the inbound Ike to northbound Kennedy.

As a northsider, I can also just take the Ike to Wacker, Wacker all the way around and hop on LSD.

When I go that way though, it is still a challenge because traffic to the ramp going to the Kennedy/Ryan often spills over into one or two more lanes, forcing me to stay in the far left, and then immediately past that ramp move quickly over to the far right to exit at Wacker.

It makes returns from any trips out west into a challenge.

The Hillside comment is interesting. It does seem slightly better, but not by much. As was noted, the main thing was to move the jam about a mile east. And that jam exists at all hours. Coming back from DuPage at 11:00 a.m. or even 1:00 p.m., when you expect rush hour to be over, you still get the jams.

Hopefully this project will have a real benefit.

Comment by Skeeter Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:03 am
The Spaghetti Bowl!

You can try to straighten it out, but you’ll never be able to.

It’s spaghetti, man. That stuff is always a tangled mess.

Comment by Formerly Known As... Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:04 am
I would love to see the plans! The crumbling infra-stucture aside, this is as much an issue of limited square footage as it is creating/refining the path…

the Cross Town…now there is a reference I haven’t heard in years

Comment by Charlatan Heston Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:07 am
It will help locally. To move traffic on 290, you need to widen from where the Strangler stopped to Austin. Railroad overpasses, cemeteries and Oak Park are the problem.

Comment by Darienite Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:08 am
Fixing the spaghetti bowl will be akin to untying a Gordian Knot. I worry it’ll just move the jams elsewhere along the “rope”. Has to be done - like many I hope it isn’t like the strangler. What a boondoggle.

Comment by dupage dan Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:14 am
Darienite

You know, they could fix some of that in Oak Park. Here the Eisenhower is in a trench with the CTA Blue line and the CSX Altenheim subdivision freight tracks. CN taking over the EJ&E a few years back pretty much zeroed out freight traffic on the CSX tracks, so conceivably the CTA could be moved over to the freight tracks and more room opened up for the highway. CSX could run what is left for freight trains at night. That would rquire alot of cooperation between different government bodies and a private railroad company, so it’s probably just a pipe dream.

train111

Comment by train111 Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:15 am
I grew up in Chicago and drove through there often. The construction will be a real thrill for anyone going downtown. I am being forced to deal with a new stop sign in my little central Illinois town which took my daily commute from 5 minutes to 6. This morning I had 4 cars ahead of me at the sign. Simply brutal.

Comment by zatoichi Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:20 am
Oh my - You mean to tell me its the #1 bottleneck in the country, and there was oppostion from neighbors and neighborhood groups… many of whom have moved into the area in the past 20 years living in new buildings and renovated loft buildings?? (gasp)!

Well, I’ll be! I thought Chicago was one big wasteland, falling apart because of (fill in the blank). You mean all those downstate Republicon legislators (David Reis, Adam Brown) and the Chicago Tribune were all wrong about the city? Amazing!

Comment by low level Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:27 am
450 million would have repaired a lot of roads downstate.

Comment by foster brooks Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:35 am
In a word: UGH!!

Comment by Loop Lady Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:36 am
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the northbound Ryan ramp to the westbound Ike when it wasn’t backed up - any day, any time. It’s crazy. I hope the fix works.

Comment by Joan P. Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:37 am
Sound like another city I will be avoiding for the next few years.

BTW - If you have plans to drive through Louisville KY, between now and the end of 2016, consider going some other direction. Kentucky is starting a project to reconstruct about 1.5 miles of I-65 in Indiana, the Kennedy Interchange on the South side of the Ohio River and construct a new bridge along side of existing I-65 bridge. When I worked down there, I saw a traffic study that had traffic queue (backups) projects of up to 14 miles long. Here is the project website: http://kyinbridges.com/

Comment by Huh? Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:37 am
i thought bike lanes were prohibited on interstates…

Comment by bored now Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:40 am
This will be a huge boon to the economy - long term and short term. Great move by Governor Quinn! Now let’s get the Ike four lanes throughout and time and money will be saved like you wouldn’t believe.

Comment by phocion Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:40 am
Going to be a nightmare for more than a year, probably. And it will impact businesses and trucking as well.

Use the trains more.

Comment by walkinfool Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:41 am
A big problem with this project is that IDOT’s numbers (e.g. 50% delay reduction) are overly optimistic. When developing its 30 year plan, CMAP concluded that drivers in the region would save 1.2 seconds per trip. This may well be averaged out over every driver in the region, not all of whom take the Ike, but still — this isn’t going to “fix” congestion.

CMAP concluded that the cost/benefits of this project did not merit inclusion in the fiscally-constrained plan. IDOT waited for the planning process to finish and then rammed it through anyway.

The reality is that nothing is going to remove congestion from the Circle. Instead, we should try to re-engineer the approaches so that vehicles arrive at the interchange slower, more orderly, and more safely.

FYI: Streets Blog Chicago(http://chi.streetsblog.org) has covered this story quite a bit. They are writing from an urban alternative transportation perspective, but they have made public issues like the sabotaging of the transportation planning process and IDOT’s suspect “benefits.”

Comment by FP_J Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:42 am
450 million would have repaired a lot of roads downstate.
As a downstater who probably spends more time in Chicago than most other downstaters, this affects 400,000 people a day, and the people who depend on those 400,000. There are stretches of interstate downstate that barely attract 2,000 vehicles a day. Be glad you got that. The city and suburbs pay their fair share, and this is a project of national significance. And please understand I am a defender of the downstate counties getting their fair share, since they have 80% of the actual roadway network in the state, and those roads support our #1 export business, agriculture.

Comment by Six Degrees of Separation Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:46 am
What Moke said - I’d really like to see some sort of crosstown expressway (even if it’s limited by vehicle type), maybe along the Cicero Ave. corridor. The late Mayor Daley was prescient about that.

Comment by lake county democrat Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:49 am
Even if it were a good idea, which I don’t think it is, I think that the chance of seeing the Crosstown built is virtually non-existent. The days of dynamiting expressways through urban neighborhoods is over.

Comment by FP_J Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:54 am
nightmare for more than a year

It’s scheduled to be a 4 year project…..

Comment by plutocrat03 Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:57 am
This will be great when its done. But I might be retired by that time.
They really should move the Ike to the Kennedy lanes to the far right. I take the Ike to the Ryan and if we didn’t have to cross the lane going to the Kennedy it would flow smooth.
And this work is definitely needed. There is no way trucks can navigate the exit ramps quickly which invariably slows down all the traffic. Two lanes would make it flow much quicker.

Comment by Been There Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 11:58 am
When my daughter lived off Belmont and Damen, we had to take that awful route to get to her. My husband simply called I-90 the Parking Lot. I was unfortunate enough to have car trouble on that death trap and spent several agonizing minutes praying to survive. As a downstater, I say “spend the money and fix it!”

Comment by lincolnlover Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 12:03 pm
Might not be to the point, but this large construction project kinda refutes the whole “police state emergency” excuse by the speaker of the house just a bit, doesn’t it? If we can come up with 450 million to correct a highway logjam, seems like there is no need to break previous contractual obligations to the retirees, right?

Comment by Roadiepig Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 12:05 pm
The problem here is that you have two very heavily traveled interstates coming together. It doesn’t matter if you are in Chicago, LA, SF or STL. Drivers just seem not to be able to handle the transition. You combine fast speeds with unfamiliar drivers and you get brake lights which leads to slow traffic.

Comment by BIG R. Ph. Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 12:06 pm
Now that the engineers have “The Spaghetti Bowl” under control, now let’s cut them loose on Pension Reform!!!

Comment by South of I-80 Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 12:23 pm
–That would rquire alot of cooperation between different government bodies and a private railroad company, so it’s probably just a pipe dream.–

They talk about widening at Oak Park all the time. The village could howl, but eventually the state could trump.

Railroads are a different story. If they don’t want to move, good luck. Old Man Daley at the height of his power couldn’t budge them to establish one central station in the South Loop.

Plus, the cost is off the charts. Railroads, the Blue Line, housing — nobody will be stepping up anytime soon.

Comment by wordslinger Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 12:24 pm
My understanding is that the freight trains couldn’t run on CTA tracks anyway. At least not without the CTA platforms “folding up” out of the way when the freight trains rolled through.

Comment by FP_J Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 12:38 pm
–My understanding is that the freight trains couldn’t run on CTA tracks anyway.–

There are both freight and CTA tracks along the Ike in Oak Park.

Comment by wordslinger Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 12:51 pm
There is enough room for CTA to scoot over to make room for a lane or so, if the RR wants to go down to 1 track. There are practically no customers left on the line, so I think the RR would be anxious to sell the whole width for the right price. Word is correct that the RR could stonewall if it wanted to.

Comment by Six Degrees of Separation Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 1:07 pm
True. I was referring to the train111’s proposal, which sounded like the freight companies sharing the track at night.

Comment by FP_J Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 1:11 pm
===There are practically no customers left on the line===
They basically use it as a holding yard. I hardly ever see the trains moving.

Comment by Been There Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 3:02 pm
The CTA and freight ran together before. The Milwaukee Road ran on the Red Line north of Irving Park until 1973. In fact the north end of the Red Line and the Purple line in Evanston started life as freight rail lines.

Comment by train111 Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 3:05 pm
Bad idea to commingle light rail with freight traffic. Scheduling is impossible and in case of an accident, the passengers have no chance.

Comment by Plutocrat03 Thursday, Jul 18, 13 @ 4:49 pm