Hollywood producers love a good sequel. But what about road engineers? While a successful movie's return squeezes extra profit out of a film franchise, a valuable highway follow-up cashes in on the lessons learned from previous work, yielding infrastructure that holds up over time. On the other hand, the engineering equivalent of a bad movie is a bloated boondoggle of a road that cracks under pressure.
In the case of Chicago's Wacker Drive, an epic rebuild more than a decade in the making, the effort so far hasn't been a flop. Based on lessons learned 10 years ago on a first phase, Chicago Dept. of Transportation is now pushing the life expectancy of the new Wacker to 100 years from 75 years in its second, final rebuild.