In 2019, state officials estimated that 155,000 vehicles in 2040 would cross the bridges on an average summer day, an increase of nearly 27 percent from that earlier time. Closing a lane for repairs can mean an extra hour’s drive each way for workers at Shepley Wood Products, which ships 25 percent of its business over the bridges, primarily the Sagamore.Īnd then there is bridge-dependent tourism, which swells the Cape’s year-round population of 230,000 people to more than 500,000. The bridges each have four, 10-feet-wide lanes - 2 feet narrower than modern standards - with no medians or shoulders. There also are concerns about shuttling patients for medical care, and school buses that ferry children over both sides of the canal in Bourne. “From the Cape’s perspective, it’s our most important infrastructure project.”Ībout 50 percent of the Cape’s workforce now lives off-Cape, which means that any long-term traffic disruption squeezes the economy. “It’s been frustrating because it’s such a glaring need for people who live on the Cape,” Niedzwiecki said. Niedzwiecki has heard the warnings before, but the urgency to solve the bridge dilemma seems greater now because of the Cape’s escalating changes in demographics and commuting. The Bourne is rated as structurally deficient, and the Sagamore as fair, although there are no imminent safety concerns. In a March 2020 study, the Army Corps of Engineers warned that side-stepping a replacement decision could force the federal government to choose rehabilitation, which last occurred in the 1980s, “in order to maintain reliability and safety of vehicular traffic over the canal.” Kristy Senatori, Executive Director of the Cape Cod Commission surveyed underneath the Sagamore Bridge. “And after a major rehabilitation, you would have essentially the same structures with all of the long-term issues.” “The traffic impact of a major rehabilitation would be catastrophic,” said Steven Tupper, deputy director of the Cape Cod Commission, a regional planning and development agency. In the meantime, the clock is ticking for the bridges, which will face another long round of traffic-choking rehabilitation if they aren’t replaced.
A green light for the Cape now must wait until next year, at a minimum, when more grants for large-bridge projects will be announced under the massive federal infrastructure bill approved in 2021. The latest request, which would have paid for half the total project, was beaten out by large bridge projects in Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, and California. The setback followed an earlier disappointment, when the project failed to win federal grant money in September. The federal government this month rejected a $1.88 billion application from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and the US Army Corps of Engineers, which owns and maintains the bridges, to replace them. The hurt figures to linger longer for Shepley Wood Products, a third of whose 130 employees cross the bridges every day, as well as many others who depend on the spans for work and pleasure.
0 kommentar(er)
