MISALLOCATING PUBLIC MONEY?

Your tax dollars will be at work, attempting to fix the Chicago Circle expressway interchange.

First, there will be four more years of construction delays, with the attendant congestion.

That’s the word from the Illinois Department of Transportation, which has been rebuilding what used to be known as the Circle Interchange or, informally, the “spaghetti bowl,” since 2014. The finish date for the project had originally been projected at 2019. IDOT now expects it to be complete in 2022.

IDOT engineers warn that the biggest impact to traffic is coming in the summer of 2020, when a major ramp will need to be closed. This is the ramp from the inbound Eisenhower Expressway to the northbound Kennedy Expressway, which sees 26,000 cars a day.

Why is the project taking so long? It involves three different interstates, a constricted urban area, working around the CTA Blue Line, multiple bridges, a city water pumping station and the need to keep traffic flowing in a spot that sees 400,000 vehicles every day, said Steve Travia, engineer for project implementation at IDOT.

Not too long ago, there was a rebuild in the spaghetti bowl to move that ramp from the left side to the right side of the expressways, in order to reduce the incidence of drivers diving to the left at the last minute, something that the Wise Experts of Highway Engineering discovered was a Design Flaw a previous cohort of Wise Experts didn't see. There are still drivers diving to the right at the last minute, whether because they're clueless or because that's their strategy ...

In part the rebuilding, if that's what it is, has been delayed because other parts of the road network are past their sell-by date.

IDOT also needed to move up the rebuilding of the Interstate 55 and Lake Shore Drive interchange, because of structural problems that needed immediate attention. That meant that some of the Eisenhower work on the Jane Byrne was delayed so that the state would not have two critical access points into the city under construction at the same time, IDOT spokesman Guy Tridgell said. The I-55 work ended late last year.

Apparently, even the previous replacements of the left-side lanes wasn't enough, as they were so narrow that a disabled semi could block them.  Just another hidden subsidy to the motor carriers, and there are a lot of them on that interchange.  "The junction has been rated as the biggest freight bottleneck in the nation by the Federal Highway Administration."  How much of that is container traffic being rubbered from one railroad intermodal facility (Union Pacific and Burlington just west of there; New York Central, er, Norfolk Southern, a few miles south) to another?  And how much of that is on rubber because the railroads haven't yet gotten their act together moving containers around or through Chicago, or can't protect the cargo from the local sticky-fingers?

Apparently, though, part of being spokesman for the highway department is attempting to put a happy face on things, once the work is done, supposedly by 2021.  "Improvements to the junction are expected to reduce traffic delays by more than 50 percent, according to IDOT."

Sorry, no.