Final piece of long delayed Navy Pier Flyover takes shape over Chicago River
on track for completion by year’s end
The project, the crown jewel of the revamped lakefront path, is in the home stretch of construction.
The end is in sight (fingers crossed).
The final pieces of the Navy Pier Flyover are coming together, and the project, which has experienced repeated delays, is on track for completion by year’s end.
On Tuesday, the steel supports that will undergird a 20-foot wide path that’s being added to the east side of the Lake Shore Drive Bridge were being painted “Chicago Bordeaux” — a familiar color to anyone who’s ever crossed a bridge in Chicago.
The new pathway over the river will be raised and lowered along with the main bascule bridge that’s spanned the river since the 1930s to accommodate boat traffic.
Key components to complete the pathway over the river will be arriving in Chicago from Georgia in the next several weeks, according to Larry Mestan, the engineer who’s managing the project for the city.
Several of those components will be assembled into two smaller bascule bridges on either end of the new pathway to allow clearance for the large bascule bridge to go up and down without slamming into the bridge houses.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/8/18/21374147/navy-pier-flyover-t...
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Permalink Reply by ketoguychicago on
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From that article: The $64 million project has drawn repeated criticism for taking longer to build than the Golden Gate Bridge (four years). It's hard to pin what's more unsettling - the time (i.e. planning and managerial misadventures) or the cost to get me over the river with my bike, when I could already get over the river there with my bike and had done so for years.
Instead of that $64million for a bridge we got sold, we could have funded 100,000 bikes at $640 each (had they been available at the time) to a hundred thousand new bike commuters, just as a for instance. That would quadrupled commuter cycling in the city? Or people wouldn't commute with those bikes these days because of the Covid, and would just ride them for health or fun.
Despite new CDOT leadership, there's no evidence from this that things are improving. The city is facing huge financial pressure (this wasn't new) but with traditional city tax sources from retail, property, hotel, restaurant, air-travel and convention activity on a major down-turn, this city is going to face even great budget short-falls, and with help from donated money or not, this isn't the sort of thing the city can keep doing.
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