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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bridge closures may be inconvenient for residents who have to deal with increased travel times, a spokesperson 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.
