"When Hell freezes over:" IDOT chief’s emails reveal new completion date for Eisenhower Expy project
By Lawrence Columbus Davis
State senator had inquired when his constituents “would be spared the daily torture of driving 90 minutes for an 11-mile commute.”
Reconstruction of the Eisenhower Expressway and the Jane Byrne interchange, which officials initially estimated to be completed this year and then revised to 2022, no longer has an official completion date, according to emails obtained by The Chicago Machine.
“This project will outlive you and me and maybe our grandchildren,” IDOT Transportation Secretary Omer Osman wrote in an email to an elected official from the western suburbs.
“I’d love to say it will be done by 2022, like we’ve said previously," Osman added, "but obviously that was positive thinking. It could be 2032 or 2042 or, more likely, it will last in perpetuity. What’s that phrase, ‘when hell freezes over?' That's probably more accurate.”
In a recent email to state Sen. Don Harmon (D-Oak Park), Osman explained that engineers miscalculated the size of shovels that workers would need -- they needed to be much bigger. Later, project engineers concluded that actual bulldozers would be necessary for the project to remain only decades behind schedule.
Harmon said his semi-suburban constituents enjoy listening to NPR and have discovered many enjoyable podcasts along their endless commutes, but they also are weary of getting up two to three hours before they must be at an office just 10-12 miles from their homes.
"You talk about Hell, but my constituents are in purgatory," Harmon wrote in response.
Interstate 290, known as the Eisenhower through Chicago, was built in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was designed to handle 100,000 cars daily. But the extreme growth of Chicago’s suburbs in the late 20th Century means that the eastbound Ike alone, as it enters the city, now handles up to 2 trillion vehicles per minute, with drivers all jockeying for space, and it appears that shall be the case for eternity.