East Stadium Bridges preliminary designs topic of meeting Tuesday
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Ann Arbor area residents will get a chance to discuss preliminary designs for the East Stadium Bridges project during a community meeting Tuesday.
The work has been deemed the city's No. 1 transportation project.
The meeting will take place from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in the Pioneer High School cafeteria and follows a similar meeting held in October.
Earlier this month, five beams were removed from the bridge over South State Street.
Angela Cesere | AnnArbor.com
One noticeable change since that October meeting is the removal of five beams this month on the bridge over South State Street.
Planning for the replacement of the East Stadium bridges over South State Street and the Ann Arbor Railroad originally began in 2007 as part of a larger project. City officials have estimated the work could cost $22.1 million.
Previous planning for the project included reconstruction of East Stadium west to South Main Street and bicycle and pedestrian improvements on South Main from East Stadium to Ann Arbor-Saline Road.
But given the urgency of replacing the bridge over South State Street, the project has been scaled back to include only the bridge replacement and related improvements.
The East Stadium Boulevard Bridge over South State Street, built in 1917, and the bridge over the Ann Arbor Railroad tracks, built in 1928, are a few hundred feet apart.
According to the city, both bridges are "structurally deficient and functionally obsolete." In March, the city permanently reduced the traffic lanes on the bridges from four to two lanes due to safety concerns.
Visit www.a2gov.org/stadiumbridges for more details.
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A grandiose superadequate Broadway bridge is not needed here. It's neither the time nor place for wasteful extravagence.
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Construct a bridge with minimal bells and whistles. Include one pedestrian walkway. Consider constructing one vehicle lane per direction. We don't need a raceway. A traffic calming bottleneck may be a great solution.
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The bridge will be functional in this configuration, allowing affordability and safe travel. It will be simpler and faster to construct.
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Posted Nov 30 2009
The city has applied for TIGER grant funding for the vast majority of this construction. (I believe this is one of 3 TIGER proposals from the Ann Arbor area, with the other two being WALLY capital costs and the Fuller Transit Station.) Currently there is $1.5 billion allocated to this federal program, but $57 billion worth of applications. That said, there is a strong likelihood that Congress will dump a lot more money into the TIGER program as part of a new jobs bill in December / January. We will learn in February if this grant is approved.
If the grant is approved, great. If it's not, that's probably the time to figure out a scaled back proposal, assuming that's even possible given all the federal and state requirements that constrain the set of legal solutions.
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Posted Nov 30 2009