Be they suburban commuters or White Sox rooters, going Greyhound or Chinatown-bound, anyone traveling to or through Chicago after March 1 is going to be affected by the two-year, $210 million repair project on the Dan Ryan Expressway from 31st Street to the Eisenhower.
Believe it. And make your plans now to avoid it, highway officials say.
”The project is at the heart of our expressway system and it will affect everything-the Calumet, the Stevenson, the Eisenhower, the Edens, even Lake Shore Drive-the whole transportation system in the area,” said Charles H. McLean, traffic and maintenance manager for the state Department of Transportation.
”We`ll be working on only a 3-mile section of a 125-mile system, but one that handles 225,000 vehicles a day,” McLean said, noting that a stretch of the Dan Ryan just south of the repair zone is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most-used roadway of any in the world.
Ald. Patrick Huels (11th), whose ward includes Comiskey Park and Bridgeport, which has several trucking depots along the Dan Ryan, is afraid many drivers will use his neighborhood as an escape route.
”We`re going to have major problems, no doubt about it,” he said. ”The city and state have been making some improvements and installing new traffic signals on Pershing and Ashland, because they`ve designated them as alternate routes.
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”But educated drivers aren`t going to take those routes. They`ll be going down Archer and other streets right in the neighborhoods. The trucks will be a big problem, for sure.”
Huels predicted that 31st and 35th Streets will be jammed-particularly when the White Sox are playing-and that Canal Street and Lake Shore Drive will also become clogged.
”The state hired a consulting firm to study what`s going to happen, and they wanted to set up a community meeting in my ward to find out if there are going to be any problems. I said, `You`re getting paid to have us tell you we`re going to have problems? Well, we`re going to have problems.`
” Although the driving public is just beginning to contemplate the upcoming period of sick transit ingloria in Chicago, those who drive for dollars-truckers, delivery services and the like-have been mapping their strategies for more than a year in monthly meetings with state and local officials.
And yet, the driving pros know it is going to be one long haul.
Even UPS is down. But not out, they said.
”We know it is not going to be any fun, but adversity is not foreign to us,” said Bob Para, hub and feeder manager for the north central region of United Parcel Service.
UPS will rearrange time schedules for deliveries to its massive distribution center at 1400 S. Jefferson St. to avoid peak traffic periods, but it will not shut down the facility, which sits just off the repair zone.
”We can`t change drastically because our whole network is based on time spans, but we will adjust,” he said. ”We are prepared to do whatever it takes.”
One measure taken by UPS involves eliminating, whenever possible, the use of trucks that normally transport trailers from one piggyback railroad yard to another in the city.
For example, drivers for Pennsylvania Truck Lines normally pick up trailers at the Conrail piggyback yard from trains that have arrived from the East Coast and then drive the trailers 11 miles, through the Dan Ryan repair area, to the Santa Fe Railroad piggyback yards for shipment to the West Coast. The 11-mile truck haul is known as the ”rubber link”-in reference to truck tires as opposed to the ”steel link” when train wheels carry the goods.
Because of the expected traffic tieups along the Dan Ryan, UPS has tried to eliminate the ”rubber link” whenever possible by having locomotives from the Santa Fe run directly into the Conrail yard and pick up the piggyback trailers ”so that they never hit the ground,” said Mike Carroll, operations manager for Pennsylvania Truck Lines.
On a busy day, more than 200 trucks make the 11-mile run between the two rail yards, but when repair work begins that figure may be cut by as much as 35 percent. The Dan Ryan repairs could force layoffs of 20 percent of the 60 drivers who work for the trucking firm, according to Carroll.
”I have talked to our competition, and they are all having the same problem,” he said.
Nearly 400 trucks roll into the Union Pacific Railroad Canal Street Ramp each day off the Dan Ryan to pick up and deliver goods. The road work will probably double the turnaround time for those truckers, and time is money in that business, said Cruz Duran, chief supervisor at the ramp.
”The competition is too great for us to start jacking up prices to compensate, so we have to absorb it,” he said.
The Greyhound Bus Co. runs 37 buses in and out of the city on the Dan Ryan each day and will continue to use it during construction ”because we have no choice,” said John Rice, transportation manager.
Greyhound has proposed two alternate routes to the city, Rice said. In peak hours, Greyhound would like to have its buses that are entering the city from south leave the Ryan at Garfield Boulevard, travel to Lake Shore Drive and then to the Loop. Buses departing the Loop would take the reverse route.
”The other (alternative) is to continue on the Ryan to the I-55 cutoff
(Stevenson Expressway) just west of McCormick Place and then take Lake Shore Drive to the Loop,” Rice said. ”This would take us into the construction area, and we`d probably use this only in off-peak hours.”
Permits are required for trucks and buses in using Lake Shore Drive, and the City Council has not yet acted on Greyhound`s proposal, he said.
”Even with the alternate routes, we will add time to our trips. Right now, it takes 25 minutes to go from the Loop to 95th Street on the Ryan. With the alternates, we figure it will take about 43 to 48 minutes to do it.”
Some trucking business executives, such as W. Eugene McCarron, executive director of the Chicago Regional Trucking Association, lobbied the state Department of Transportation to establish more alternate routes for truckers. But because of limited funds, only one is planned-along Ogden Avenue, Ashland Avenue and Pershing Road-and it is recommended for use only as an emergency measure when the two lanes on the Dan Ryan that will remain open in each direction become clogged.
”I don`t have all the answers, but it is ludicrous that there is only one alternative route for trucks when there are a quarter-million cars and 50,000 trucks a day on that road,” said McCarron, whose organization represents about 200 trucking firms.
”There will be a tremendous cost imposed on the public, with embargos of shipments and surcharges and conversions of tonnage rates to hourly rates and substantial increases in freight rates,” McCarron predicted. ”I think there is going to be great havoc.”
Other trucking executives were less critical but equally concerned about what lies ahead on the road.
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”It is certainly going to be tough, no doubt about it, but in three years we will have better roads to operate on,” said Fred Serpe, executive director of the Illinois Trucking Association, which represents 600 trucking firms and related businesses.
Serpe agreed that traffic tieups and alternate routes will add hours and miles and heavy costs-up to 50 percent increases in some areas-on the trucking business, ”but these (repairs) are things we need to do to continue to serve.”
Transportation Department officials will attempt to alleviate some of the traffic congestion by taking cars off the Dan Ryan and running commuters in and out of town on rails-Metra rails.
Metra received a $1.25 million grant from the Federal Highway Fund through the Transportation Department to build or expand seven reliever parking lots-creating 3,000 more parking spaces-accessible to highways that feed into the Dan Ryan. Metra will spend $80,000 of that grant to advertise itself as a peaceful alternative to the Dan Ryan over the next two years.
More passenger train cars will be added, and routes changed, to accommodate Dan Ryan deserters, a spokesman said.
But Metra will not be building a new platform station to accommodate White Sox fans in search of new pathways to Comiskey Park, which sits just west of the Dan Ryan at 35th Street.
”We talked with Metra once, but there were never really any serious plans to have a platform built,” said Paul Reis, manager of community affairs for the White Sox.