Ramping up the Jane Byrne ConstructionMuseum

The arrival of 2021 meanswe’ll soon be in Construction SeasonNine of a notorious project that the Illinois Department of Transportation initially saidwould take four and a half years to complete.

We refer of course to the glacially paced reconstruction of The Jane Byrne ConstructionMuseum. We use that respectful moniker— always capitalize The, like The Ohio StateUniversity— for what old-time Chicagoans used to call the Jane Byrne Interchange.

IDOT began the project in 2013, pledging to modernize the nation’s most congested crossroads by June 2018. Didn’t happen. Instead, the project got delayed in every direction and motorists mummified as they sat, and sat, in gridlocked traffic.

With lime-vestedworkers making only sporadic appearances and with their construction cranes and diggers routinely mothballed— motionless forweeks, tilted in the dirt as if in midheave— the reconstruction project impressed us as a vast cultural exhibitwaiting to be preserved in amber. Hence, The Jane Byrne ConstructionMuseum, or The JBCM.

Within the last year, though, actual road-building progress has variously alarmed and heartened us. Is IDOT no longer devoted to still-life art? Or has the agency, having let its scheduled completion slide to late 2022, finally realized that it can’t launch the next Jane Byrne reconstruction until it finishes this Jane Byrne reconstruction?

Whatever the reason, drivers who didn’t abandon the interchange years ago have, in recent days, found the final four rebuilt ramps open. Museumwork has shifted to the mainlineDan Ryan andKennedy expressways— althoughwe trust that, somewhere, IDOT also is building amuseumwing to house its excuses for the years of delays and cost overruns: poor soil conditions, unhelpful rules fromChicago’s CityHall, mistakes by engineering firms, utility rerouting, the diversion of resources to emergency repair projects elsewhere, and on and on.

Why IDOT didn’t include adequate allowances for the unexpected in its original scheme remains amystery, sort of. This is Illinois, where projects rarely finish on time and never under budget. Someday, perhaps as the ExcusesMuseum begins to take patrons, wewill understand through one of those talking exhibits the back story of howthis project got so derailed.

But there has been progress with new ramps open for motorists. Shushed museumvisitors don’t raucously applaud, however, so let us offer a polite golf clap. (Never mind that the new completion date in 2022, if it happens, would bring to 10 the number of construction seasons this project has galumphed along).

Surely you aren’t surprised that the cost has grown by some 48%, from $535.5 million to $794 million. Most museums recruit donors to cover their big projects. The Jane Byrne ConstructionMuseum instead gets public dollars. Which has uswondering howmany gazillion gallons of amply taxed gasoline burned into the atmosphere as all those mummified motorists sat and sat.