Hyde Park to O'Hare rush hour drive?

[chet everett]

I gotta feeling that somebody that can't make sense of traffic reports on the radio might get more than a little intimidated snaking around on Columbus Dr as it plows under Wacker and over to Ohio, and while I do think that it is certainly a more interesting drive and omitted shave ten percentage off the total trip time I would hate to thinks hat happens if they miss the Ohio St feeder and end up on Milwaukee Ave without a GPS...

The travel time maps on Google and the tri- state corridors web sites will let you know how slow moving traffic along the Ryan/ Kennedy combo tends to be without all the local jargon of radio traffic "personalities"...

http://www.travelmidwest.com/lmiga/m...me=chicagoArea

[Drover]

Originally Posted by snoylekim

..And, you'll get a few more chapters in from the Books on Tape on the return trip back to HP .. that's not a fly-right-down drive either ...

In fact it's even worse than the drive out because the express lanes are working against you. After about 6pm the traffic flow out to the aiport is actually not too bad. At that time it still clogs up around Lawrence but then starts moving again once you hit Harlem. The drive in, on the other hand, often sucks up to 8pm or later.

[Northernnomad]

Thanks, Chet. I'll probably go for the more straightforward Stevenson-Ryan-Kennedy route; I do have a GPS, but it loses its signal on Columbus and sometimes takes a good while to find it again.

By travel time maps on Google, do you mean just the time estimate you get with driving directions, or is there more to it?

[chet everett]

The "traffic layer" is actually more useful than the "travel estimate" that google provides. I think the time estimate is based on some kind of average for all hours of travel, while the "traffic layer" is based off real time data. When I have seen a pattern for a few days around a lane configuration changes and such I can get a pretty good sense for what sorts of travel speeds are normal and what sorts indicate some kind of anomaly. For a one shot pick-up at the airport that is not really needed, but if you monitor it for a few days (especially during a storm or other traffic choking event ...) you can get a sense for worst case scenario and understand why a 90 minute trip might be part of the contingencies.

[Manigault]

The worse jams come where two highways merge and lose lanes. So I would not take the Stevenson to the Dan Ryan to the Kennedy. The Stevenson-Dan Ryan merge is a killer, particularly since there is the close-by start of the Ike. That means there is the slowing down for changing lanes and for folks who make late lane decisions.

For that reason, in rush hours use city streets (like Columbus) to get around the big merges. Which some radio jocks dubbed 'the spaghetti bowl'.