CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Reconstruction work on the Jane Byrne Circle interchange continues to stretch out, although several milestones will see completion by year's end.
Instead of a few projects spilling over, 2022 will be a full season of construction work. And IDOT engineer Anthony Quigley said projects that were supposed to finish by summer, such as the new Monroe and Van Buren Street bridges, will be finished by late fall, when mainline work on the Eisenhower Expressway in the construction zone should be complete.
Could it have been done faster? Quigley said only if you like gridlock.
"If we would have shut the whole interchange down, there would have been a major impact to all those 400,000 vehicles getting in and out of the city, whether it's to work or special events," he said.
Quigley said the unexpected has set the project back time and again and has raised the estimated price tag from $585 million to $713 million. The reconstruction began in the fall of 2013 and was originally supposed to finish this year, but fell behind quickly when the Stevenson-Lake Shore Drive interchange began to fail.
The 50-year-old interchange is one of the busiest in the nation.
