This spring, tulips bloomed across downtown Chicago the way they do every year, the beds along Michigan Avenue and the edges of Grant Park turning pink and yellow almost overnight. It is August now. Those tulips are long gone. On Ashland and Western avenues, we see the color orange: Orange cones and patches for potholes are perennial, too. Chicago will start writing its 2027 budget this fall. Before that happens, it is worth asking why a problem this old keeps costing this much.
I told myself it was just what a city with hard winters looks like. Frost lifts the pavement every winter, crews patch it every spring, and by the time August arrives, the worst of it is smoothed over and forgotten until the next spring. But the truth is that this is what happens when a city spends money treating a symptom instead of a cause.
In late May, I spoke with Ahmet H. Aydilek, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland who studies sustainable geotechnics, the kind of research that quietly changes how engineers think about the ground beneath their feet. He said that a road is only as strong as the soil beneath it, and what fails is rarely the asphalt itself but the part no one can see.
I thought about Ashland. About Western. About every spring in this city. Aydilek was describing Chicago without knowing it.
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What compounds this is not a technical failure. It is a funding one. Each of Chicago’s 50 wards receives the same flat sum for infrastructure work every year, currently $1.5 million, regardless of how many miles of road that ward has, how old its pipes are or how much of the ground beneath it has already failed.
A 2017 audit by the city’s inspector general at the time, Joe Ferguson, found that flat formula underfunds actual need by $122.9 million a year and creates a $9.3 million gap between the best-funded ward and the worst-funded one. The recommendation was direct: Let engineers at the Chicago Department of Transportation decide based on condition data, not aldermen. Eight years later, the formula is the same. Only the number has grown. CDOT’s response at the time was that the program remains an “appropriate framework” for meeting residential infrastructure needs. It has not revisited the question since.
Meanwhile, the streets keep breaking from underneath in the same way every winter. Road salt does not just melt ice. It works its way into the ground and accelerates the freeze-and-thaw cycle that heaves pavement apart from below. None of that shows up in a photo. All of it shows up the following spring. As Aydilek put it, what fails is rarely the asphalt itself; rather, it is the part that no one can see.
This is not an abstract concern. Last December, the City Council approved a $1.8 billion bond package, and within it, sidewalk construction funding dropped from $248 million to $161 million, while the broader “Other Neighborhood Improvements” category, which covers streets and traffic safety projects, fell from $791 million to $212 million. That decision is already made. The next one is not. The City Council will begin shaping the 2027 budget this fall, and whatever it decides about infrastructure spending will lock in the same formula for another year, unless something changes first.
Fixing this is not a complicated engineering problem. Three steps would close the gap:
1. Rethink what goes into the ground. New road construction should require recycled industrial materials for soil stabilization. Aydilek’s lab work shows these materials make the ground far more resistant to water damage over time, and the city’s own construction waste is already a ready source.
2. Rebuild menu money around condition data. What Ferguson proposed eight years ago is still on the table: Instead of writing each ward the same flat check, let CDOT engineers allocate funds based on the actual condition of the soil and infrastructure. That does not remove aldermanic input. It just ties the final call to what the street actually needs.
3. Doing it right once costs less than doing it wrong every year. Smart geosynthetics and advanced drainage look expensive on paper. But weigh that cost against the patches piling up at the same locations year after year, and the math shifts. Closing the same hole 10 times costs more, in every sense, than making sure it does not open again.
The tulips will bloom again next spring. I am not worried about them. What I am watching for is whether the same cracks on Ashland and Western keep coming too.
The City Council will lock in the next budget in the near future. Chicago should decide which choice it wants to keep making — right now.
Yunus Emre Tozal is a civil engineer in Chicago and a graduate student at the Catholic Theological Union.
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