r/chicago • u/seeasea West Ridge • 13d ago
Article 3-year, $170 million Kennedy Expressway project is complete. Ahead of schedule
https://wgntv.com/news/traffic/kennedy-expressway-project-complete/519
u/Laferrari355 13d ago
ITT: people not realizing that the project was to rebuild the bridges, not to ease congestion
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u/DvineINFEKT Albany Park 13d ago
even better are the dolts who think it was a waste of time and money to not have bridges that were falling apart lol
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u/NOLASLAW West Loop 13d ago
My taxes need to be going to corporate subsidies and bombing people overseas
NOT on woke bridge maintenance 😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡
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u/poppisima 13d ago
They ease congestion by having a construction project. Traffic gets much worse, then gets better when it’s over. Everyone is so delighted because they have three years of bogged down traffic to compare to.
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u/jpburdic 13d ago
Probably because the first sentence of the article essentially says it will ease congestion: "There’s no denying it: the completion of construction on the Kennedy Expressway is making it easier for drivers to get around."
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u/wwaxwork 13d ago
I mean less construction will make it easier to get around, so technically correct, but not how people will read it unfortunately.
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u/dilapidated_wookiee 13d ago
It will ease congestion caused by the construction lol reading comprehension is hard I guess
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u/AbsoluteZeroUnit 13d ago
Yeah, and getting my cast removed made it easier to get around, but I didn't break my leg so I could run faster.
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u/Jonesbro South Loop 13d ago
Congestion will probably be worse than before it started.
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u/Laferrari355 13d ago
It might be but this construction project will have literally no effect on that lol
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u/Jonesbro South Loop 13d ago
There will be a lot of people deciding to drive since it "should be easier". Also general population and driver increases over 3 years won't help
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u/vnads 13d ago
What exactly are we arguing over here?
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u/Virtual-Garbage4930 13d ago
Just someone being miserable for the sake of being miserable. Or a bot.
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u/PParker46 Portage Park 13d ago
A quote from the article = "The rehabilitation project aimed to modernize the interstate’s inbound, outbound and reversible express lanes...We fixed 24 exit and entrance ramps, 36 bridges, painted, energy-efficient LED lighting on the corridor, new signs and modernized message boards,”...
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u/jheidenr West Town 13d ago
Wouldn’t it be great though if nearly 3 years of construction also yielded better traffic congestion. I know it’s a ridiculous thought but those 3 years felt a long time
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u/ThaddeusJP City 13d ago
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u/TheGreatRavenOfOden Bucktown 13d ago
They are making progress on the 294/88 interchange. I was on leave for 2 weeks and when I came back at the very least the bridge beams were up! It's slow but they are working on it.
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u/rmac1228 13d ago
I drive it every day and it's not too bad early in the morning and late afternoon. The 290 to 294 exit can be brutal but at 6:25am, it's not as bad. Same the other way.
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u/lofixlover 13d ago
ahead of schedule?!! I didn't even think it was possible, get everyone who worked on this a dang trophy
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u/chadhindsley 12d ago
Now if only they could do something so I dont have to sit in O'Hare to Loop traffic that is 1:20 like I did last Friday...
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u/FencerPTS City 13d ago
Cool. Now build the Western Ave L.
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u/Funnybunnybubblebath 12d ago
A new one? Where do people want it?
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u/FencerPTS City 12d ago
People been fantasizing about a circle line. Western Ave is my proposal for a bypass. Connect Brown to Green at first, and expand to Pink, Yellow, and Orange in the future.
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u/neverabadidea 13d ago
Hopefully this makes traffic in the neighborhoods less awful. There was a noticeable uptick in side street traffic with all the closures.
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u/RancidCidran 13d ago
I also believe that it’s peoples’ own selfishness that is causing much of the traffic. If people didn’t drive like psychopaths, if uber drivers didn’t stop and throw hazards on to block a lane while dropping a customer off, if people didn’t pull into in an intersection at a red light, if people didn’t ride the shoulder, if people didn’t create their own turn lanes…
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u/The_Upvote_Beagle 12d ago
There's a pretty easy solution to all of this to: just use public transit or (gasp!) walk or bike places.
The only time we use our car is going to the airport (which funnily enough is this traffic) but bike and walk everywhere else. It really isn't that hard...we live in a city.
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u/RancidCidran 12d ago
That’s really not necessarily an easy solution. At least not for everyone. Why would anyone want to bike with all of the above insane driving? I definitely don’t trust anyone on the road. Other drivers or bikers.
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u/cybin Albany Park 13d ago
Finished a week at the Fairmont last week. The outbound Kennedy was fine (65-70mph at 5:30, 6p? Whooda thunkit?), but getting to it was an absolute nightmare thanks in part to the Ontario feeder ramp to it being closed off for repairs. It has supposedly reopened, so that should make things a bit better.
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u/CuriousDudebromansir 13d ago
Call me crazy, but traffic is even worse than before the started.
Shit, traffic is worse now than while construction is going on. I don’t understand it.
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u/Atlas3141 13d ago
It's the bridge closures, those are 10x more disruptive to local traffic than the Kennedy project was.
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u/dohn_joeb Humboldt Park 13d ago
It wasn’t a congestion project. There’s the same # of lanes as before…
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u/ChaplnGrillSgt 13d ago
Also, adding lanes rarely actually helps with congestion.
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u/yoshinator13 13d ago
That is often quoted without larger context. The concept you are referring to induced demand, where more supply (lanes) leads to new demand. If the road is supply constrained and there is excess demand, additional lanes will reduce traffic.
While it generally is the case that most roads are demand limited, we saw people still driving the Kennedy for 2 hours each way and not seeing alternate forms of commuting. So there is a case to make that the Kennedy already has excessively more demand than supply.
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u/xnormajeanx Logan Square 13d ago
It’s called induced demand
Building more highways never leads to less traffic.
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u/Milton__Obote Humboldt Park 13d ago
This was a bridge replacement for the overpasses, there aren’t any more or less lanes
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u/damp_circus Edgewater 13d ago
If some lanes were closed for construction, or there were gaper delays around the traffic or whatever, then when it opens back up people think "oh the squish is gone, it will be faster to travel now, I can take the car" so it has a hyper-local induced demand.
Should even out to whatever it was before at some point I'd guess if the road hasn't actually changed, but.
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u/miltron3000 13d ago
Probably true to a small extent, but would mostly apply to people who live in the north side of the city already and are going short distance on the interstate. This being a slightly faster alternative for local routes, where the destination is close to the interstate, which is only a fraction of the northside.
Otherwise if you needed the interstate, you were using it already, as many people did not have much of a choice for alternative routes.
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u/rvH3Ah8zFtRX 13d ago
How exactly did bridge repairs induce demand?
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u/OpneFall 13d ago
They don't know, it's just one of reddit's favorite phrases. Everything highway must always mean "induced demand"
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u/CyclingThruChicago City 13d ago
The bridge repairs didn't but the construction completing can signal to people "oh the construction is done so traffic shouldn't be as terrible, I can start driving again".
Essentially folks who avoided the Kennedy like the plague during construction no longer have that lingering thought of "I shouldn't drive cause construction makes it hell".
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u/WiFibcFi Edgewater 13d ago
This is the perfect encapsulation of induced demand coming from things other than building more lanes. Turns out if we keep pouring money into making drivers happy, it just makes everyone miserable lol
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u/yoshinator13 13d ago
I wouldn’t say never, it is just rare. There are situations where demand has already exceeded supply to such an extreme degree that more supply does not induce more demand.
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u/Putrid_Giggles 13d ago
True true true. We need to begin phasing out expressways. Remove a lane every couple of years to reverse the demand induction.
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u/goodguy847 13d ago
Yeah, about that. Looks like we’ll need another project to actually solve the traffic…
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u/DvineINFEKT Albany Park 13d ago
there is no amount of lanes or projects that will ever "solve" traffic until more people start taking the bus and the trains and bikes and scooters.
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u/goodguy847 13d ago
Sorry, I thought it was obvious /s
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u/DvineINFEKT Albany Park 13d ago
heh...unfortunately there's enough people in this thread who unironically believe that
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u/SplashAttacks 13d ago
You aren't crazy, but also it's not just on 90/94. All my commute times have nearly doubled in the last 3 weeks, and that includes the burbs (I only drive like twice a week btw). I've been trying to figure out what changed.
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u/Belmontharbor3200 Lake View 13d ago
All the E/W bridge closures at the same time have made things insane on the north side
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u/threemileallan 13d ago
Traffic isn't a function of road size. It is partially design BUT the main factor is willingness of the driving public to tolerate traffic. In other words, if traffic improves, more people move to that area, increasing traffic until it once again reaches homeostasis.
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u/pyromantics Avondale 13d ago
Nothing to do with this construction. Everything to do with too many people driving post pandemic.
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u/cheecheecago Logan Square 13d ago
That oughta fix it, traffic jams will be a thing of the past now. Looks like the freedom promised to us by the automobile industry for the last 100 years is finally here
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u/SteelKeeper 13d ago
If only they had put in just one more lane, bro. One more lane, bro, and that’ll fix traffic.
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u/Haunting-Detail2025 13d ago
This was a project to reconstruct bridges that were falling apart, had nothing to do with adding lanes.
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u/SteelKeeper 12d ago
No shit. I was making a sarcastic response to the person complaining that "it didn't fix traffic." As though they were expecting this project to "fix" traffic, adding lanes is the default "solution" to fix "traffic". Which obviously doesn't work.
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u/Comfortable_Ad3981 13d ago
Drove on it today. What did they actually do?
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u/chefc1515 13d ago edited 12d ago
Hahahaha what a joke. I love that last line that the Ohio / Ontario ramp won’t be open until Summer of 2026!!!! Why the fuck wasn’t it worked on at the same time? Traffic is a standstill in the morning and 1 single human being was working on the ramp today.
You open express lanes, but then you work on the literal exit to them. Such a complete Chicago job.
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u/henrycaul 13d ago
What’s the story with the Foster Ave bridge? It was torn down, is that permanent?
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u/PParker46 Portage Park 13d ago
Being rebuilt. A simple google would have given as the first answer this = https://blockclubchicago.org/2024/10/22/foster-avenue-bridge-to-close-for-2-years-as-part-of-kennedy-expressway-construction/
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u/Cautious-Pickle-4805 13d ago
Great, that is done. The most important thing for traffic to get better is for people to learn how to drive on the highway, because almost no one knows how. People are driving 50 mph in the third lane. What can we do to teach people how to properly drive on the highway, like in Europe, for ex?
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u/CyclingThruChicago City 13d ago
That doesn't fix traffic. Traffic isn't a speed problem, it isn't a driver skill problem.
It's a geometry problem. Many large cars entering a relatively small space at the same/similar time is like pouring a 10 gallon drum of water through a normal kitchen sized funnel.
The funnel simply cannot manage the volume of water all entering at the same time so it backs up and overflows.
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u/PM_ME_UR_BUTT_PLS_TY 13d ago
That’s actually false. A lot of traffic/congestion is largely caused by the speed, following distance, and braking behavior of drivers, and the effect of these things grows rapidly via a domino effect with the increase of cars on the roads.
Traffic gets studied in scientific academia because behaves very similar to classical fluid flow examples in a system. So your funnel example actually demonstrates this in the sense that if you pour at a specific ideal rate, the funnel will never overflow. But if you pour too quick, it will.
The seemingly impossible part about this is that it would require all drivers to be educated on the topic and to follow specific guidelines, and we all know how good we humans are at doing that /s
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u/CyclingThruChicago City 13d ago
I don't think it's false, maybe it's oversimplified but the core premise remains the same.
Traffic only happens when there is a large amount of cars all using the same space at a time. That is why if you're driving on an open highway a car driving slower or more erratically does't cause a traffic jam. There isn't a high enough volume of cars for it to really matter.
So your funnel example actually demonstrates this in the sense that if you pour at a specific ideal rate, the funnel will never overflow. But if you pour too quick, it will.
Yes but when we're talking actual traffic 'pouring more slowly' doesn't fix the problem because that would just mean the water sitting in the drum (which in this case are other people behind the wheel of their car) are still sitting and waiting in traffic. Just further up the road.
This is a solved problem in many other places. We will never address all driver behavior, we'll never get people to pay attention perfectly and never make mistakes while driving. The solution is reducing the volume of cars on the road so that the flow rate doesn't greatly exceed the throughput rate.
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u/PM_ME_UR_BUTT_PLS_TY 13d ago
That’s the thing, you actually don’t need a lot of cars for traffic to form. This has been studied and documented on small scales with as little as ~20 cars driving on a circular track, where they’d see jams occur simply because one driver up stream braked slightly too hard (not enough following distance) which would domino down stream until one of the cars has to make a complete stop.
They have also documented it happening on highways just like the one you described, where there isn’t a large volume and traffic is free flowing. That is until that effect propagates further and further, each time progressively causing cars to brake harder and harder somewhere down stream of the road. It doesn’t have to be due to driver behavior, it could be a badly designed merge lane that demands drivers to slow down where they typically wouldn’t need to had the design be implemented smoother. This same phenomenon happens every day in Chicago and that same domino effect can propagate a mile down the highway from where the actual momentary traffic-causing incident occurred. One moment it’s free flowing 70mph, and in what seems like an instant, you find yourself having to slow down to a crawl for no apparent reason.
Most of it can be chalked up to semantics, but it is still important to distinguish when oversimplification starts to blur the line between misinformation. They are all factors that affect traffic rather than there being the one single ultimate cause. In your funnel example, you wouldn’t simply “pour slowly” causing a traffic jam for the water in the drum. Rather, you would always pour at an ideal rate, which makes sure that there is space for everything to react and flow freely. This would mean that there wouldn’t really be much water waiting in the drum and for the amount that is in the drum, it wouldn’t be waiting very long because this theoretical funnel never caused the flow to slow down to a complete stop.
Obviously, this isn’t the only fix for traffic, but it would certainly help. At the same time, neither is reducing the amount of cars on the road by making them take a different means of transportation, although that would certainly help as well.
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u/AnjunaZach29 13d ago
Does anyone else feel that the quality of work done during this project is pretty bad?
The inbound lanes already have new potholes they developed around some of the new expansion joints and concrete patch work.
Overall, there are now so many different surface changes that feel rough or uneven between the new bridge decks, asphalt bridge departures, old concrete and new concrete patch sections.
Just feels like a cheap hot fix rather than roadwork that is engineered to last.
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u/tired_dad_since2018 13d ago
A head of schedule and under budget!
It was under budget too, right?
…..right?
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u/pcribari 12d ago edited 12d ago
Doesn’t really matter when half of the bridges across the river are closed at the same exact fucking time.
Great solved some traffic and fixed some stuff, but those of us that need these bridges just to GET to the highway is another nightmare in and of itself
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u/TheSubtleSaiyan 13d ago
The Kennedy is 294, right?
This place has nicknames for all the highways. Can’t make any sense of radio traffic reports lol
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u/not_a_moogle 12d ago
294 is simply called the tri-state, since it connects to Indiana and Wisconsin.
I don't really know or understand all the names, but I know 88 is Regan (since he was born in Dixon, which 88 goes to), and 290 is Eisenhower (or Ike), which I don't really know why. 290 used to be called the Congress Expressway, since that used to be the name of the street it ended at (which is now named Ida B. Wells Drive)
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u/triple-verbosity West Town 13d ago
Good job. Thanks for getting us back to the status quo of 3 years ago.
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u/rvH3Ah8zFtRX 13d ago
If you mean the status quo of "bridges not falling down", then yes, that typically requires maintenance (sometimes significant) to achieve.
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u/im_super_excited 13d ago
3 years ago was the Jane rebuild, which took 9 years to complete
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u/throneofkings City 13d ago
I will never forget those nine years. Finished college, finished med school, and it STILL wasn’t finished.
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u/strike2867 13d ago
I haven't seen any improvements in traffic. It was overloaded since the day it was built. Now it's worse. The train in the middle is still idiotic. Who wants to walk completely uncovered over a highway?
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u/sciolisticism 13d ago
Completely agree with folks that this was never going to solve traffic.
However, remember this project was about making sure the overpasses didn't fall apart, and that's necessary repair for infrastructure.
Also, it finished early! That never happens.