As downtown Chicago enters its annual bridge lifting season, raising its historic bascule bridges to allow recreational boats to pass underneath, questions remain about the city’s ability to repair several of them without worsening traffic.
When the city reopened the State Street Bridge in March after nearly a year of emergency repairs, it provided a small bit of relief to commuters who had been stuck in traffic snarls along the Near North Side for much of 2025.
Those traffic headaches were the result of the city’s unusual move to close five river bridges simultaneously to catch up on a backlog of necessary repairs, many of them bascule bridges with movable spans that pivot upward.
Exactly 100 of Chicago’s 601 bridges are listed in the same “poor” condition as the State Street Bridge, which unexpectedly shut down in April 2025 — several months before engineers were planning to carry out repairs.
That’s 16.6%, according to a Sun-Times analysis of federal bridge inspection records, and well above the national average of 6.7%.
One poorly rated bridge that may require a similar intervention as State Street is the Grand Avenue Bridge over the North Branch of the Chicago River, according to Farhad Ansari, a University of Illinois Chicago professor of engineering.
Ansari reviewed inspection records of some of Chicago’s most heavily used bridges and identified several contenders for potential emergency closures in the future. He said Grand Avenue stands out as one of the worst.
“I’d say that’s the most likely bridge they look at in the near future,” he told the Sun-Times. “Its superstructure, and basically all the truss work are in critical condition.”
Closing that bridge could worsen traffic on the Near North Side, closing off another vital east-west link and adding to a list of nearby closures, including the Chicago Avenue, Cortland Street and Lake Street bridges, as well as the Halsted Street viaduct.
‘We’re always playing catch-up’
Bridge inspections are federally mandated at least every two years, and the results are publicly listed online. Each bridge is rated zero to nine in four categories: its deck (road surface), superstructure (the beams stretching the length of the bridge) and substructure (the pillars underneath).
If any of three scores are rated four or below, the bridge is classified “structurally deficient” or “poor.” But that doesn’t mean such bridges are at imminent risk of falling down.
“A bridge can easily be classified structurally deficient even though it isn’t anywhere near structural failure,” says Joseph L. Schofer, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University.
However, a poorly rated bridge must be inspected more often. And transportation officials are obligated to close any bridges they deem too dangerous.
“That’s a legal requirement, an ethical requirement,” Schofer says. “I can drive over a lot of bridges rated structurally deficient. But I’m counting on the management authority to say, ‘No, you can’t go across this bridge because it really poses a danger.’”
Bridge repairs are funded by a mix of federal, state and local money. And much of the funding is allocated to bridges based on how poorly rated they are, Schofer says.
More than 8% of Illinois’ 26,927 bridges were identified as needing repairs or structurally deficient in 2025, according to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, which advocates for increased federal funding of bridge work.
“We don’t have the kind of funding to keep ahead of the game,” Schofer says. “We’re always playing catch-up.”
Could bridge closing-related traffic get worse?
Many of the currently closed bridges aren’t expected to reopen for some time. The Chicago Avenue and Halsted Bridges are closed until the end of 2026. The Cortland Street Bridge, the oldest bascule bridge in the city, is closed until mid-2027. And the 110-year-old Lake Street Bridge is not set to reopen until January 2028.
A spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Transportation said there are no other major bridge closures planned “in the near term” — though the department is in the early stages of planning repairs for the Western Avenue Bridge over the Sanitary and Ship Canal and 92nd Street Bridge over the Calumet River.
The city is also preparing to close the two Division Street bridges over the North Branch at Goose Island but not until next year at the earliest. Both of those bridges are in such poor condition they must be replaced entirely.
The city has pledged to be more transparent about planned bridge closures after an outcry following the pile-up of bridge closures last year.
A group of alders raised concerns about the increased traffic congestion in October, leading the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance ordering the transportation department to alert them in a public hearing ahead of any bridge closure longer than a month. But it doesn’t apply to emergency closures, like what happened to the State Street Bridge.
In addition, the Illinois Department of Transportation oversees a number of bridges in the Chicago area and is planning this year to carry out repairs on Foster Avenue over the North Branch and Devon Avenue over the Edens Expressway.
The Foster Avenue bridge replacement over the Kennedy Expressway, which began November 2024, should be completed by the end of this year, a department spokesperson says.
Bridge closures may be inconvenient for residents who have to deal with increased travel times, Ansari says, but the repairs are important to keep bridges safe.
“The public should know the Department of Transportation is closing these bridges for their own good,” he says.
