Instead of a short-term closure, Pittsburgh’s Charles Anderson Memorial Bridge will remain out of commission for the foreseeable future. However, Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration said the change of plans is good news, and that the city will be able to “dramatically expedite” a full rehabilitation of the span that connects Oakland and Squirrel Hill by way of Schenley Park.
“My team has been working diligently to find a path to accelerate the funding for this vital piece of our city infrastructure,” Gainey said in a release last week. He added that the city will be able to take “many months out of the projected timeline.”
Just how many months remains unclear. In response to questions about the projected timeline, city officials told WESA that conversations with consultants were ongoing, and it would be “premature” to discuss a timeline.
The city closed Charles Anderson this winter, after a structural review found that it would not be safe for traffic without repairs. At the time, officials expected even comparatively modest repairs to cost between $1 and $2 million and take at least four months of work. Because the bridge was already slated for a full rehabilitation, they said they would search for ways to speed up the process.
This is the second time Pittsburgh and its partners have found a way to fast-track a bridge reconstruction project. PennDOT rebuilt the Fern Hollow Bridge within just a year of its collapse. That project was expedited after city and state emergency declarations, which allowed design and construction to proceed simultaneously.
PennDOT Deputy Executive Secretary Cheryl Moon-Sirianni, who has said repeatedly that it’s not possible to expedite all bridge projects, said that work on the Charles Anderson bridge has been going on for years.
“Only the final design of [Charles Anderson] is being expedited,” she said. “Which will allow the City of Pittsburgh to begin construction in 2024 or 2025.”
Still, the new schedule may be little comfort to drivers in the short term: Existing detours for motorists will remain in effect until the full rehabilitation is completed (though pedestrians and cyclists may continue to use the bridge). And the temporary repairs that would have reopened the bridge to traffic later this spring are now off the table.
It’s not clear just how much time savings there will be from the expedited approach, given that construction was slated to begin in 2025 before the bridge’s closure, according to the city’s project page. However, at Pittsburgh City Council on Wednesday, officials with the city's Department of Mobility and Infrastructure told councilors that construction funding for the bridge originally wasn't allocated until 2027.
But plans for the bridge have been prone to rescheduling before.
‘A living document’
Built in 1939, the Charles Anderson Bridge has been slated for an overhaul for years. The city’s 2016 capital budget allocated $750,000 for preliminary engineering work. In the years that followed, projected allocations and timelines for the project changed repeatedly. Money for the project was earmarked in capital budgets over the next three years, with an allocation that grew to $3.3 million by 2019, but that wasn’t spent down.
The city convened public meetings in 2019, but the coronavirus pandemic slowed the work. Even so, in January 2022 the city was able to offer a proposed design for the bridge’s rehabilitation. The $48 million overhaul would preserve the bridge’s historic nature, allow for better passage of large Pittsburgh Regional Transit buses and school buses,while providing wider sidewalks for pedestrians and a separate cycle track for people on bikes.
And the project gained new momentum this winter, when PennDOT and the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission stepped in.
Most infrastructure funding comes from the federal government, which doesn’t just write checks directly to Pittsburgh. Instead, the money must go to a Metropolitan Planning Organization, which the feds task with planning out transportation priorities for urban regions. For Pittsburgh and the surrounding 10-county region, that organization is called the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, or SPC. For a project to move ahead, it has to be on SPC’s to-do list, which is assembled every year.
“It’s a living document,” said Andy Waple, deputy executive director for SPC’s programs division.
That to-do list, called the Transportation Implementation Plan, gets amended every month by the SPC’s Transportation Technical Committee, a group of planners and engineers who know how to get projects out the door.
At its regular meeting last week, the committee moved the Charles Anderson Bridge up the priority list, and allotted $25 million in 2024 to its construction.
Waple said that happened when PennDOT alerted the committee that it could move funds from the state’s Bridge Investment Fund, powered with money from the federal infrastructure bill. He said PennDOT took that step thanks to advocacy from the mayor’s office.
Waple said such allocation changes happen all the time. And in fact, if money isn’t directed to priorities, “We won’t receive as much federal money in the future and … that money can be taken away.”
PennDOT press secretary Alexis Campbell said the funds moved to support rehabilitation of the Charles Anderson bridge came from projects that had either not started or were facing delays. She said those funds would be replaced when the projects were eventually ready to begin.
Pittsburgh City Council is expected to support an additional $1.1 million for Michael Baker International, the city's primary consultant for the Charles Anderson Bridge, to move the span into final design.
