You can forget about driving across the Adams Street Bridge for the foreseeable future. Beginning tonight, the Chicago Department of Transportation will close the roadway for 13 months to reconstruct the viaduct structure over Union Station's tracks and make improvements to the bridge and surrounding intersections.
The bridge will be closed to cars and bicycles for the duration of the construction, but will be open to pedestrians with the exception of two 30-day closures later this year and some intermittent night and weekend closures, according to CDOT. Even those brief shutdowns of foot traffic will have a notable effect on commuters—the walkway has one of the highest daily pedestrian traffic counts in the city.
Driving downtown hasn't exactly been a cake walk over the past year. The Loop was gummed up for nearly all of 2015 during construction on the new Loop Link bus rapid transit system. The city is also wrapping up renovations on the western edge of the Loop's El tracks along Wabash Avenue. But right when downtown commuters thought they had a break from traffic-clogging projects, the city is set to close another major street.