By: Tim Bruns
Back in August 2016, the editorial staff of Roads & Bridges covered the progress of Chicago’s Jane Byrne Interchange reconstruction project. One of the signature accomplishments over the last year for the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) was the completion of the westbound flyover bridge over the Jane Byrne, which carries northbound I-90/94 traffic over to merge with westbound I-290 commuters emerging from Congress Parkway and downtown Chicago. In 2017, IDOT has more work in store for this infamously congested interchange.
“This year we’re going to be taking down the old ramp that held that movement, as well as building the remainder of I-290 outbound pavement where that ramp lands,” IDOT Engineer of Operations Steve Travia told Roads & Bridges. “We’ve got the nice new bridge up in the air, but we need to build some westbound I-290 lanes to receive the second lane of that, which will clean that up a lot.”
Building bridges
In addition the Byrne, the Land of Lincoln has a variety of major construction work in store for the next few years, as well as a considerable amount of progress under its belt on key road and bridge projects. Illinois Transportation Secretary Randy Blankenhorn says the federal FAST Act did help to increase the state’s transportation construction funding, which is expected to go up in the next year.
“We had about a 10% increase [in the budget], roughly a $200 million increase in what we will announce as our program for fiscal year 2018,” Secretary Blankenhorn told Roads & Bridges. “That $200 million is almost entirely going into our major bridge program—we’re doubling the size of it.”
The secretary pointed to work expected to begin this year on a new I-74 bridge in the Quad Cities, a region of four principal cities that includes Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa, and Rock Island and Moline in Illinois. IDOT is partnering with Iowa to complete what is to be one of the largest bridge projects in the state’s history.
Blankenhorn emphasized that work needs to continue to be devoted to the state’s bridges. “We have a lot of river bridges, a lot of bridges with our neighbors that we need to be focused on,” he said. In particular, he added, investing in and addressing issues with structurally deficient bridges is going to be a priority for the state.
Other projects around the state also are making progress with new bridges. In the past year, progress continued on the reconstruction of the ramp system linking the I-55 Stevenson Expressway with Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. The project is continuing this year, with outbound traffic being taken off the existing bridges in its current stage. Eventually, the project will get traffic in both directions on new, multi-lane bridges. “The point of moving this project forward was that those old bridges had suffered significant deck failures,” Travia said. “And we were losing active lanes of traffic on a weekly basis.” Work on I-55/Lake Shore Drive should be complete by the end of 2017.
Farther southeast of where the Quad Cities bridge project will begin, a widening and reconstruction of I-74 in Morton and Tazewell County also came to completion. The project involved adding a lane in each direction, modernizing the interchange with I-155 into a safer configuration, and improving the entrance and exit ramps at Morton Avenue.
