GOLD COAST — The traffic nightmare isn't over yet on Lake Shore Drive.
After saying all lanes of Lake Shore Drive would reopen by 3:30 p.m., the Chicago Department of Transportation said one southbound lane on the lakefront thoroughfare would remain closed until 6:30 p.m. Wednesday. The closed lane is the left-center one.
The announcement came after travel times more than tripled heading into Downtown from the north Wednesday morning, as closures meant for the overnight hours spilled into the morning rush.
That's because the lakefront road was reduced to just one southbound lane on its "S curve" along Oak Street Beach Wednesday morning, which along with rain caused major delays.
The temporary closure is part of a broader resurfacing project on Lake Shore Drive from Grand to North avenues.
"They're working on a drainage structure, there's no other way to get in there," CDOT spokesman Mike Claffey said.
At one point, drivers took things into their own hands and started driving in closed lanes, creating traffic jams on both sides of workers digging around sewers in the dead center of the southbound lanes near Oak Street Beach.
With several inches of the road scraped off, leaving sewer caps exposed, drivers swerved at some points and slammed into the sewers at other points, leaving a graveyard of hub caps on the side of the road.
The city had warned of the closures previously, but said work would be done at off-peak traffic hours between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Claffey said crews couldn't work on the curve overnight because it would have been too noisy.
The total resurfacing project is expected to be done by mid-November, Claffey said. Overnight work will resume Thursday night, weather permitting.
Drivers on the Dan Ryan and the Kennedy, meanwhile, had a headache of their own Wednesday morning. The lousy weather scrubbed President Obama's helicopter ride from the South Side to O'Hare Airport, forcing him to motorcade to O'Hare. That led to a separate round of closures.
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