Hey, Look at This. Wide Lanes. This Is So Luxurious. Woo, Yeah.

By Matt Wood in Miscellaneous on Oct 31, 2006 1:02PM

Dan Ryan commuters will get a taste of sweet, sweet, open lanes this winter, as the rebuilt express lanes reopen. Outbound lanes will open starting tomorrow -- a month early -- and inbound lanes will be reopened by early December, returning the Ryan-arrera to its normal configuration. But any relief is fleeting of course, because the local lanes will close in March for the second half of the construction project.

IDOT's Avoid the Ryan campaign has apparently been successful in preventing the total gridlock nightmare that some feared when the project began. They estimate that 35 to 45 percent of every-day Ryan commuters have switched to an alternate route during the construction. Plus, it always helps when there's no playoff baseball on the South Side to slow things down in October.