Rendering courtesy of CDOT

The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) announced there will be overnight full closures of westbound Madison Street between Michigan and State Street for up to five week nights this week and next -- from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. -- to allow for crews to remove steel beams that held up the old CTA station house above Wabash Street. The demolition and removal work is part of the construction of a new Washington-Wabash CTA station.

The overnight full closures are planned for tonight and tomorrow night, as well as next week, August 3rd, 4th and 5th– the fifth night is scheduled in case of weather or other delays.

Westbound Loop traffic will be routed via Randolph and Adams Streets during the closures.

The work is part of an 18-month project to a build a new Washington-Wabash CTA station that will replace two century-old stations at Madison and Randolph with a single state-of-the-art, fully accessible, elevator-equipped station with wider platforms. The project has also required the full closure of Wabash between Washington and Madison for the duration of the work.

The CTA station work is going on at the same time as the Loop Link project, which involves installing red-colored bus only lanes on Madison, Washington, Canal and Clinton on a circuit extending from Union Station to Millennium Park. The Loop Link, scheduled for substantial completion by the end of 2015, will modernize the Loop’s transit infrastructure and make bus travel faster and more reliable for the roughly 30,000 bus commuters that travel across the corridor and at Union Station each day.  Two lanes will be dedicated for cars and trucks and protected bike lanes will be installed eastbound on Washington, westbound on Randolph and in both directions on Clinton.

For the Loop Link work, Washington Street is currently reduced to two lanes from Wacker to Wabash and Madison is reduced to two lanes from Michigan to Wacker.  City traffic officials are closely monitoring traffic impacts and areas of congestion so that real-time adjustments can be made, if necessary, to improve traffic flow.

For more information on the Loop Link, go to www.ChicagoLoopLink.com

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