The three-year rehabilitation is finished, but a new investigation found some of the worst traffic in more than two decades. The results raise questions about what expensive highway projects actually deliver.

For three years, drivers using Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway endured lane closures, construction delays and commutes that seemed to grow longer with every passing month. State officials promised that the inconvenience would lead to a faster, safer roadway once the work was finished. The $170 million rehabilitation project ended in October 2025, but a year later, commuters are still confronting unusually severe congestion. Some of the worst travel times have occurred after the construction crews departed.

A joint investigation by WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, published October 23, examined 22 years of travel-time records and found that delays between downtown Chicago and O’Hare International Airport reached historic levels during the project. The state spent more than $170 million rehabilitating approximately 7.5 miles between downtown and the Edens Expressway junction. Yet the reporters found that significant congestion continued in 2026, calling into question whether the investment produced the improved travel experience officials had emphasized.

The numbers illustrate the scale of the problem. In June 2025, outbound drivers traveling from downtown toward O’Hare between 2 and 3 p.m. on weekdays faced an average journey of 74 minutes. During the same month, average travel times exceeded 65 minutes across multiple afternoon and evening hours. And in June 2026, months after the principal rehabilitation project ended, the average inbound journey from O’Hare toward the Jane Byrne Interchange reached 75 minutes between 5 and 6 p.m. on weekdays. Researchers calculated that a typical commuter traveling inbound in the morning and outbound in the afternoon spent the equivalent of approximately 12 additional days in traffic over the construction period compared with expected travel times.

Repairs Are Not the Same as Congestion Relief

The findings expose an important difference between repairing an existing highway and increasing its ability to move traffic efficiently. Roadway rehabilitation can involve resurfacing pavement, repairing bridges, updating safety barriers and extending the useful life of infrastructure. Those improvements may be necessary even when they do not reduce the number of vehicles competing for limited road space. A smoother road does not automatically mean a shorter commute when the underlying transportation network remains congested.

This is important because transportation projects are often communicated through the benefits residents will eventually experience. Faster travel can be one of those benefits, but it requires more than completing construction on schedule. Traffic patterns, surrounding bottlenecks, population growth, incidents and other road projects can all affect journey times. In Chicago, the separate Foster Avenue bridge reconstruction over the Kennedy has experienced repeated delays, further complicating conditions for commuters.

The WBEZ investigation found that several Kennedy-related projects overlapped during the rehabilitation period, creating additional disruptions beyond the primary work. The continued congestion does not establish that the rehabilitation was unnecessary or that no infrastructure improvements were delivered. It does demonstrate that the project has not translated into the consistently faster commutes many drivers expected.

The Cost Is More Than Gasoline

For workers who depend on the expressway, unpredictable travel times have consequences that extend beyond transportation frustration. A person who spends additional hours commuting loses time that could otherwise be spent with family, completing household responsibilities or resting before the next workday. Employers can also face delays when workers, deliveries and service vehicles encounter congestion. The financial burden is difficult to measure without detailed economic analysis, but the cumulative loss of time is substantial.

Congestion can also push drivers onto nearby neighborhood streets as they search for alternate routes. Those decisions can create additional traffic for residents who do not use the expressway themselves, spreading the effects of highway congestion beyond the roadway under construction.

The findings raise accountability questions for the Illinois Department of Transportation and elected officials. What outcomes were promised when the rehabilitation was approved? Which improvements were primarily about structural maintenance and which were expected to improve traffic flow? How are those results being measured after completion? And what additional investments would actually reduce travel delays along one of Chicago’s most important transportation corridors?

Chicago’s experience illustrates why large public works projects should be evaluated through more than construction budgets and completion dates. An agency can finish an expensive rehabilitation while commuters continue experiencing the problem they most wanted solved.

The Kennedy may be in better physical condition than it was before the work began. But for drivers spending more than an hour traveling a familiar route, the difference between a repaired highway and an improved commute remains difficult to overlook.