Less than two months remain for D Construction to complete the Cicero Ave. bridge over I57. Per the IDOT Current Road Construction Report, the completion date is still 6/30/19, and the southbound lanes are not finished. Given their glacial pace, it looks like the southbound lanes might make the deadline.
As we have covered previously, there is a new logistics park slated to be built just south of this bridge. Keeping it under construction for, based on the southbound debacle, another year, seems like a great way to sabotage the logistics development.
The same company, D Construction, has also been awarded the contract to redo the 167th street bridge over I57. That is contract number 60T43, detailed plans of which are found here. Interestingly, they are already behind. The CRCR lists project dates of 04/08/2019 to 10/18/2019. It’s a month in, and nothing has been done, except blocking the lanes off.
This makes for another project that looks to be vastly overdue.
And this is another roadblock to the logistics park. Since D Construction looks to be on the ‘one year per side’ plan, they will have succeeded in limiting traffic into and out of the park twice. This results in one point of expressway access, at I57 & Vollmer Road, about 5 miles south of the construction site. Those miles add up.
What will be done about it? This is Illinois, so nothing. This level of contempt for the people of the state is why we are hemorrhaging population. And now the Mandarins in Springfield want to increase gas taxes to $.44/gallon (more than doubling it), and make licenses and registration more expensive (double on licenses, by half for registration) to boot. Honestly, if you can leave this banana republic, now is the time.
Progress! Construction resumed on the bridge over I80 on Cicero Avenue (IL50) – with more than one person this time.
While the rebar is still unfinished on the north end of the north-bound lanes, there is new concrete (not a lot, but some) on the south end of that section. They are working on the transition bit between the deck itself and the road. There are some big gaps there, like the earthworks or side braces needed reinforcing. That is where the focus seems to be for the past few days.
It’s good that work has resumed. The southbound lanes are deteriorating rapidly. Patches from a month back are, basically, gone.
In related public works news, the frontage road labeled either Fusion Way or Martec Int’l Blvd (which is not, by the way, in any regards an actual boulevard) has degraded again. The short form of the story is that the road is twisted and evil, more pothole than road. Everyone drives it like it’s a slalom course, dodging the worst of the holes in the road (even semis do this). Someone filled in holes with dirt & gravel in February, and the holes are back, and by April will be back to their usual size and severity.
The problem here is that none of the local political entities accept the responsibility for the road. The county (Cook), township (Bremen), and municipality (Country Club Hills) all point at someone else as ‘responsible’.
Cook County’s map shows that the section in question is, in fact, the responsibility of Country Club Hills. The township is responsible to the north and south (which is weird), but the section in the middle, the worst section, is all Country Club Hills’ responsibility.
I never expected this to have a bridge repair component. But here we are. The state of the infrastructure in Illinois, specifically bridges, is really poor. The mandarins in Springfield have ignored infrastructure, choosing instead to focus on literally anything else. As a result, we have some serious issues up here.
IL50 & I57: Bridge 016-1014
At this writing, there are 109 days to go before repairs are late. And we are 116 days past the original due date, as covered previously.
Today there were three trucks that might be workers. One dude moving a pallet. No work on the rebar.
This is troubling, because the state report from 4/12/18 on the status of the bridge deck is that the superstructure is in serious condition (3), and that the structural evaluation rating is 3, intolerable, high priority for correction. This is a bridge that sees a lot of traffic, and a lot of heavy truck traffic. Especially since the ‘construction’ of a gravel parking space just south of the span, and the addition of a power company yard (lots of cherry-picker type lineman trucks) in the same area.
US41 & Chicago River: Bridge 016-6030
This is the span that, rather infamously, cracked on February 11th. To compare to the IL50 span above, Lake Shore Drive was given ratings of ‘serious condition’ for the superstructure, ‘intolerable – high priority for correction’ for the structural evaluation, and ‘intolerable – high priority for replacement’ for the deck geometry. Despite this, and despite the crack last month, there are no open projects visible on the IDOT website regarding this span.
I80 & Des Plaines River: Bridges 099-0040 & 099-0041
There is a sign warning people not to cross, that it is too dangerous. The I80 bridges over the Des Plaines River are two disconnected spans. As such, they get two listings. Why does this matter? It matters because the east-bound superstructure rating is ‘poor’, while the west-bound rating is ‘fair’. Neither is great, of course.
These are taken from the publicly available reports, and contradict the media reports of which is worse. The above ratings also contradict the ratings reported by Shaw Media. Admittedly, the detailed reports I cite do not have conclusions in them, only data. There may be, and likely is, more information available to the actual media, or via a FOIA request. I am not the media, and haven’t sent in a FOIA request. The reason I go into this is that the linked report says that there may be repairs in the spring, which is…well…almost here. And I cannot find any contracts or reports to suggest that IDOT will be doing anything this spring.
In fact, there is a project study concerning I80 that isn’t scheduled to be finished until summer.
Reports are that “short term repairs” will happen starting next month, but there is no schedule for full reconstruction.
What Is Blind Lemur Conservatives?
It began as a joke – something so obvious even a blind lemur could see it. The Democrats seem canine-centric (Blue Dog, Yellow Dog), so I figured we on the right could use a fun animal, and frankly, lemurs are all the rage! So I hear. Kinda. Anyway, after deciding that the leadership is so inept that a blind lemur could lead better, I decided to create this movement. And perhaps even spin it off into the real world. Stranger things have happened.
