[drewbug01]

It’s worth asking why the estimates for the station have doubled over the course of the last two years (I can’t find a source explaining why, right now).

But it’s still perhaps an unfair point to make. State/Lake is one of the busiest stations in the system, in the heart of the downtown corridor. It is not a simple “update” - it’s a full, in-place rebuild. And, that rebuild includes adding elevator connections from the elevated platforms down to the subway below. The elevated infrastructure in question is about 130 years old, and they have to keep running the trains over those tracks the whole time.

It’s a massive engineering problem, even before you add in the additional costs of paying crews to work overnights so that the whole CTA doesn’t come to a grinding halt while they do it.

If you search around a bit, you can find the construction costs for other overhauls the CTA has done recently, which far more agreeable price tags. If this one is huge, there’s probably a very good reason why.