Estimated reading time: 10 minutes (2031 words)

Pick a day, any day. If it ends in y, the odds are that traffic will be horrendous. Trips to or from the suburbs regularly take 90 minutes or more, and moving anywhere within the city is equally as trying. Chicago’s traffic has always been notoriously bad but recent road work and shifting traffic patterns have exacerbated the issues. Even for a population used to sitting in traffic jams these new issues are pushing commuters to their breaking points. 

Why has traffic become so bad? And what can city leaders do to address it?

How bad is it, really?

Like a business, highways and roads respond to the law of supply and demand. But in this case the supply is mostly fixed because roads are built with a set number of lanes. Demand — how many people want to use the same road at the same time — can fluctuate wildly. 

Demand for Chicago’s roads is extremely high. Official data published by the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) reports that the annual vehicle miles traveled in Cook County in 2022 was 30.5 billion, up from 29.6 billion in 2021 and 27 billion in 2020, mirroring the ebbs and flows of the pandemic recovery. Although data for 2023 isn’t available yet, a policy expert from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency on Planning (CMAP) was quoted in May observing that traffic this year is already higher than pre-pandemic levels.

A report compiled by GPS company TomTom paints a similar picture. Chicago’s traffic increased in 2022, the most recent complete data set available. Even for short commutes of six miles, Chicagoans spent 176 hours driving per year. For longer commutes — 30 miles or so, which encompasses commutes from the city to the suburbs — that amount of time ballooned to 846 hours sitting in traffic. TomTom attributes 82 hours and 394 hours, respectively, to congestion. Thursdays were the worst days to drive, taking on average almost half an hour (27 minutes) to go just six miles, and over two hours for 30 mile commutes. 

Not all traffic is created equal, though. “What was totally unseen [when the highways were built] was the amount of freight traffic and freight as a mode of transportation,” said Dr. P.S. Sriraj, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Urban Transportation Center. “I'm talking about trucks. Truck traffic was very, very minimal, and now it is growing every year and showing an upward trend for the foreseeable future,” Siraj said. 

About one in every seven vehicles on the road in Chicago is a truck, according to CMAP, and unsurprisingly, the bottlenecks they create are on the same highways commuters use every day. Given Chicago’s position as a multimodal freight hub, including 10 interstate highways in the metro area alone, truck traffic here can have an outsized impact on larger patterns. 

“The demand [for the roads] has increased and has been increasing and will continue to increase exponentially,” Sriraj said. “When these assets [roads] were built, they were built with a very specific target traffic in mind. That has long since been overshot.”

“There's no remedy anywhere in sight”

There’s a running joke among Chicagoans that there are really just two seasons here: winter, and construction. Lately that has felt more like gallows humor than slapstick. 

There is some truth to that uniquely Chicago observation because it points to something very real: roads are constantly being worked on. Roadwork has increased dramatically across the last few years, leading to delays, congestion, and reduced lanes on heavily trafficked roads. Downstream, this means more traffic and frustration for drivers. 

According to Sriraj, the current school of thought around asset management (road work), which developed over the last twenty years or so, boils down to proactive maintenance so roads are kept in a good functional state. On paper, this sounds reasonable. For example, when a pothole develops it follows that it should be filled in instead of getting worse. But in practice, this approach comes with some disadvantages.

“This is where it becomes a very vicious cycle,” said Sriraj. “If the state or the feds do not have the funding lined up to upgrade or maintain an existing asset, then you let it decay to some extent. The next time you're looking to upgrade that asset back to a state of good repair the need becomes all the more acute and very prohibitive in terms of cost. By punting it to the next year you’re just incurring more expenditure. Before long, you're looking at a major overhaul of the asset category that you're interested in.”

This is what has happened to Chicago’s roads. 

“We have an infusion of federal funds and states are scrambling to use it for shovel ready projects,” according to Joseph Schwieterman, director of DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development. “Construction is top of the list because those [projects] are ready to go, and we have federal support for that. So suddenly now it's everything all at once.”

To this point, IDOT’s informational website on the Rebuild Illinois infrastructure initiative notes that the state has not had a “comprehensive, multi-year capital plan” since 2009. Since then, the state’s infrastructure has suffered the effects of time and deterioration and is in desperate need of maintenance. 

An annual infrastructure report card published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave Illinois a C- in infrastructure across the board in 2022. Roads specifically received a D+ grade. The report card in part summarizes the state’s road conditions:

Congestion remains a challenge. The Chicago region reported a travel time index of 1.29 in 2019, meaning during peak hours it takes nearly one-third longer to make a given trip. This was a minor improvement from 1.32 in 2017. Available funding for the surface transportation network has grown substantially thanks to Rebuild Illinois and the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. However, the outlook for long-term, sustained revenues indicates these gains may be short-lived. With commitments being made to reduce carbon emissions and eliminate production of internal combustion engines by 2030, a steep decline in fuel tax revenues is anticipated. Additionally, the recent adoption of increased rainfall intensities highlights the inadequacies of drainage systems designs which leads to an overall loss of resiliency for the system’s capacity.

A White House press release from July 2022, shortly after the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, said that Illinois will receive about $11.3 billion in funding for highways and bridges across the next five years (until 2027). 

According to IDOT, Illinois will invest $44.8 billion into infrastructure improvements over the next six years, with $25.3 billion being allocated to road projects. In Chicago, the highest funded project is going in part to the work currently being conducted on the Kennedy Expressway, which is just one segment of a $561 million plan to systematically rebuild the highway. 

“Funding is very, very difficult to get, and it tends to be siloed,” Sriraj said. “There is an overwhelming focus on the roadways and the automobile and the funding for [those areas] is disproportionate. Federal highways get the lion's share. The other modes of transportation are neglected, which make them very unappealing for the user, and thus creates its own vicious cycle.”

To Sriraj’s point, most of the work being conducted in and around Chicago is on the interstates — roads that are maintained largely by federal funding. And now that funding has been secured, current projects are everywhere. The exceptionally poor traffic conditions will not abate until the construction work is complete, and even then, most of these projects are not expanding highway capacity. 

“There are no good scenarios for the traffic outlook on either the Kennedy or the Eisenhower,” Schwieterman said. “There's no remedy anywhere in sight. It's frustrating.”

Solving the problem

Leaders could try to implement creative solutions to unacceptable traffic patterns as opposed to treating them as natural consequences of road work. 

Sriraj suggested that infrastructure should be considered holistically, even though roads typically get the most attention. “Is freight on the waterways being used to the maximum capacity that it can be used, or is there an overwhelming burden on the road network? The bottom line is, can this network be looked at as one system as opposed to a series of silos?”

Schwieterman had another suggestion: congestion pricing. In practice, congestion pricing makes it more expensive to drive during peak times, and therefore removes people from the roads who don’t need to be there at that precise time. 

“We don't have a systematic analysis underway about where we could impose reasonable tolls to keep our system moving better,” he said. “I think we have to find little incentives that can go a long way for people who are doing superfluous driving.” 

In New York City, congestion pricing will be implemented in the spring of 2024. New York’s plan doesn’t apply to the interstates running through the city, but it will address traffic in the central business district during peak times. 

According to Bloomberg, the plan “will charge E-ZPass motorists driving south of 60th street, the city’s central business district, as much as $23,” with variables considered for passenger cars, taxis, and rideshare vehicles, as well as discounts for drivers who meet certain income thresholds. 

Despite these wrinkles, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority expects the pricing plan to bring in $1 billion in new revenue per year and reduce the number of daily vehicles entering the toll zone by 20 percent. 

Could congestion pricing work in Chicago? CMAP seems to think so. In a 2012 report, CMAP concluded that if priced lanes were implemented on local expressways, “during the morning peak, drivers choosing the express lanes on I-55, I-90, or I-290 could expect to spend 49, 31, and 66 percent less time traveling, respectively, than they do now.”

Chicago has taken some small steps in that direction. In January 2020 the city  introduced a congestion pricing policy aimed at “Transportation Network Providers,” otherwise known as rideshare companies (Uber, Lyft, and Via). Under the policy, there is a $3 surcharge to be picked up or dropped off in a specifically designated downtown zone during peak hours, defined as 6:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M., Monday through Friday. Surcharges rise to $8 if the destination or point of origin is an airport, Navy Pier, or McCormick Place. Shared rides (such as Uber Pool) are also charged: $1.25 to and from downtown or $6.25 for airports, Navy Pier, and McCormick Place. A full breakdown of the policy and a zone map can be found here. 

A follow up study conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March 2023 found that “the implementation of the congestion pricing policy led to an increase in shared TNC [Transportation Network Company] trip counts and a much larger decrease in single-occupant trip counts. Overall, the policy implementation is associated with a 7.1% reduction of total TNC pickup trips, a 16.4% increase of shared TNC pickup trips and a 11% reduction of single TNC pickup trips.”

As is the case elsewhere, Chicago’s downtown congestion pricing scheme reduced traffic and encouraged carpooling. The same could be the case on local expressways, if civic leaders push for it. 

Too much traffic, and not enough leadership

The construction is needed — but so is leadership, according to Schwieterman. 

“It's unfortunate that there's not more accountability on the headaches caused by poorly executed construction projects,” he said. 

The major projects currently underway are being administered by IDOT, which contracts out the work to local companies. According to Schwieterman, there isn’t an incentive structure for the contractors to coordinate their work or mitigate the disruptions the road work creates. And because so much of the funding is tied back to federal sources there are layers of bureaucracy that make accountability difficult. 

City leaders could certainly be more vocal, even though much of this work is out of their hands. “I think the mayor and city council should be making a lot of noise about the unacceptability of the state's timeline,” Schwieterman said. “We need analysis comparing our state with others to demonstrate or to show that there's a way to get things done faster. I'm just not convinced that we're the norm.”

The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.