Editorial: Finish the Jane Byrne and bring home I-490

The Jane Byrne Interchange, that hellishly tentacled concrete-scape offering up confusion and delays around the clock, is to be finished in November.

Yes, finished. Not that it looks anywhere close at present.

This absurdly lengthy project, responsible for countless missed exits, blown appointments, fender-benders and all manner of stress, has been a topic of this page before. No wonder. It started in 2013 and it was supposed to be done four years ago. It will have cost a whopping $800 million by the time it’s complete, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation and Tribune reporting, more than $300 million more than the original plan.

We don’t think future Chicagoans will look on this as money especially well spent. The huge junction just west of Chicago’s Loop funnels through a lot of transferring traffic that doesn’t really want to go anywhere near downtown but has no other choice. All of the dystopian acres of soaring concrete ramps (graffiti-strewn, at present) are not visually appealing and there was an excellent case for burying at least a few hundred feet of Interstate 90/94 so that the booming West Loop would be more closely connected to the Loop itself.

But that is all cars under the bridges at this point. It’s been nine years. We’ll settle for having the project done. In November. Write that down.

We are, though, much more enthusiastic about the coming of I-490 and its much needed provision of western access to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The city moved ahead last month with selling the necessary land to the Illinois Tollway Authority to get the improvement done.

This project also gets something right that the Jane Byrne plan didn’t fix for downtown access: I-490 will remove traffic that’s not trying to travel to the airport from the single funnel that serves travelers actually trying to get to the terminals. I-490, a tollway, will carry north-south traffic around the western edge of the airport, getting it out of the way, and also providing an additional access points to the terminals.

For city dwellers heading to the airport on the oft-choked Kennedy Expressway, the benefit should come from much less traffic as you get on the already improved I-190 feeder into the big airport, and as you head back downtown on the Kennedy. And if you’re traveling from, say, Elgin to Oak Brook, you’ll be able to transfer from eastbound I-90 to I-294 south while staying west of O’Hare (a more direct route) and not getting caught up in all the craziness around the airport. In theory, at least, everybody wins.

As with all else involving the Illinois Tollway, we’ll have to watch for cost overruns and boondoggles. And don’t hold your breath: this one is slated to be completed in 2025.

But that’s a lot quicker than the endless Byrne project and, frankly, more obviously beneficial to the infrastructure of the region.

Still, write this down too: I-490 finished in 2025.

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