One Major New York Metro Area Bottleneck To Be Replaced; Another Awaiting Federal Approval

Utter the words Kosciuszko bridge to a New Yorker, and besides the multiple inflections and pronunciations, you'll get a string of epithets. The bridge spans Newtown Creek straddling the Brooklyn and Queens border, but it also links the Brooklyn Queens Expressway with the Long Island Expressway (LIE).

The bridge is functionally obsolete and a danger to the public. It is built without modern sight lines, lacks breakdown lanes, and the merge lanes for traffic coming from the LIE is nonexistent. Vehicle crashes on the bridge are frequent, and cause significant backups on major arterial highways.

In other words, it's a prime candidate to be replaced.

Talks have been underway for years to replace the bridge, and within the past couple of years, the talk has given way to tangible progress on a design competition and this year Gov. Cuomo and the New York State legislature have adopted a transportation budget with $460 million going to the bridge replacement.

Construction on the project is scheduled to begin by next April 1, and the new structure is expected to be ready by 2017. It is one of hundreds of structurally deficient bridges around the state.

New York Works is a so-called infrastructure bank that draws from pooled government and private funding designed to speed up spending on big infrastructure projects.

The state Department of Transportation is in charge of the project, but its website hasn't been updated to reflect the state funding, or which of the four design alternatives have been chosen. I'm rather partial to the cable stayed version, though the through-arch design strikes a balance between reflecting the original truss design and a modern design aesthetic.

Regardless of the design chosen, it will incorporate new technologies, improved safety and sight-lines, and better integration of traffic flow. The old span will remain in use until the new span is completed.

Meanwhile, the Port Authority is awaiting word from the federal government on approval to lift the roadway on the Bayonne Bridge to permit Super Panamax shipping to clear the span. Failing to lift the bridge would mean the New York/New Jersey port would be at a major competitive disadvantage and force shipping to go to other East Coast ports to offload and would affect thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of business.

Port Authority Commits To Raising Bayonne Bridge By 2016

These are busy and tough times for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Chris Ward, the head of the agency is being forced out to make way for Gov. Andrew Cuomo's choice, Patrick Foye, the agency has taken serious flack for its massive fare and toll hikes, and claims that it misspent money on the rebuilding at Ground Zero that has left its capital funds depleted and key infrastructure projects go undone.

One of the projects that has to get done is raising the height of the Bayonne Bridge. The bridge, which straddles the Kill Van Kull between Staten Island New York and New Jersey is an engineering masterpiece and was at one time the longest arch bridge in the world. However, it's height is a major problem considering that new super Panamax shipping is expected in the next few years as the Panama Canal expansion is completed in 2014 means that a new generation of ships wont be able to pass underneath and access the area's container shipping ports for at least two years.

Thus, it's critical that the height of the bridge roadway be raised to allow for the new class of shipping. The Port Authority is now saying that the bridge will be raised by 2016. Setting a date is a good start, but that means that other ports along the northeast will be able to benefit from shipping until the project is completed.

The project would require the roadway be raised within the arch itself, and approaches adjusted accordingly.

The Port Authority can't delay this project and in reality, it should be expediting the project to complete it by 2014 because of the importance to the local economy. Tens of thousands of jobs are in the balance here, and delays will put those jobs at risk.

UPDATE:
NJ.com has an overview of the process to raise the road deck to the 215 foot level above the water. The Port Authority has also put together a video.