The Boston Globe
Bridge out ahead
Key part of O’Brien Highway inbound to shut
By Eric Moskowitz, Globe Staff | November 5, 2010
CAMBRIDGE — As bridges go, the Craigie is not much to look at. From the roadway, it scarcely seems a bridge at all, just a long, flat stretch of pavement in the shadow of the Lechmere Viaduct. But as an artery between Boston and Cambridge, it is vital, carrying nearly 25,000 cars in each direction every day — almost twice as many as the grander Longfellow Bridge half a mile up the Charles River.
Starting tomorrow, the bridge will close to inbound traffic for at least a month, and transportation officials are expecting major headaches, despite their best efforts to urge commuters to plan alternate routes or switch to public transit. Traffic will be detoured through East Cambridge and Charlestown; even the duck boats will be affected, unable to ply the Charles because the channel below the bridge will also be closed.
“This one will be very much noticed by people,’’ said the state’s highway administrator, Luisa Paiewonsky. Barbara Broussard, who runs an East Cambridge neighborhood association, was less sanguine: “The Craigie bridge repair is going to be a disaster.’’
The Craigie project — which next year will again require closing of the inbound lanes for about two months — will be, for commuters as well as engineers, the most complicated and disruptive stage yet in an eight-year, $400 million-plus effort by the state to repair six long-neglected Charles River crossings. The Boston University Bridge has been under construction for more than a year; the Longfellow, River Street, Western Avenue, and Larz Anderson Memorial bridges are next.
The Craigie, which at its widest point has three lanes in each direction, runs past the Museum of Science, carrying Route 28 (Monsignor O’Brien Highway) between Cambridge’s Land Boulevard and Boston’s Leverett Circle.
Planners have spent months debating which lanes to close and when, where to detour traffic, and how to monitor the myriad busy roads and intersections that will feel ripple effects of the bridge’s closure.
A series of signs already warn drivers of the impending closure and bridge work. On Monday, the first workday affected by the inbound traffic ban, police details will be posted at 40 locations to direct traffic in the vicinity of the bridge.
Officials from the State Police, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and the parking and traffic departments of Cambridge and Somerville will join their Boston counterparts in an unusual collaboration, monitoring scores of traffic cameras in a seventh-floor control room at Boston’s City Hall. There they will watch for gridlocked intersections, determine whether traffic lights need to be retimed, and make other adjustments as needed.
“Until you know what the impacts are going to be, you don’t want to overplan, but you don’t want to underplan, either,’’ said Boston’s transportation commissioner, Thomas J. Tinlin.
Drivers who do not bypass the area or switch to public transit will find themselves detoured off Route 28 southbound: either right, toward Edwin H. Land Boulevard and Memorial Drive, or left, onto the Gilmore Bridge carrying Austin Street to Charlestown.
Although the bridge will be closed to inbound traffic, two lanes of outbound traffic will remain open, and cars will be allowed to enter the Museum of Science from either direction.
Cambridge officials had urged the state to consider maintaining one open lane in each direction, but state highway engineers sided with Boston, finding that a reduction to one outbound lane would cause a backup into Leverett Circle — where cars fan out toward Interstate 93, Storrow Drive, the TD Garden, Massachusetts General Hospital, and beyond — that would do more damage to the flow of traffic than a full inbound closure.
“We’re very excited that all these bridges are being rebuilt. It feels like long past due,’’ said Susan E. Clippinger, director of Cambridge’s Traffic, Parking, and Transportation Department. “But getting the work done is really a challenge. Running this as two lanes from Boston to Cambridge and no lanes from Cambridge to Boston is very worrisome for us. . . . It’s going to be pretty uncomfortable.’’
The Craigie is actually two bridges: the longer Craigie Dam Bridge spanning the Charles, and the 45-foot Craigie Drawbridge within it that opens and closes to let boat traffic pass below. The crossing as a whole dates to the first decade of the 20th century, when civic leaders dammed the Charles — then a polluted estuary that exposed fetid mud flats at low tide — to create a broad waterway between Cambridge and Boston and build parks along the banks.
The Craigie was one of more than 540 bridges across the state that had deteriorated to a point of structural deficiency by mid-2008, when Governor Deval Patrick and state lawmakers, spurred by a fatal bridge collapse in Minnesota, enacted the $3 billion Accelerated Bridge Program.
The $43 million Craigie construction contract was awarded in June 2009. The state first repaired the structure and surface of the longer Craigie Dam Bridge, which required temporary lane restrictions but not full closure. The work that begins tomorrow is for the drawbridge.
“The bridge is really old — it’s 100 years old — and absolutely needs to be replaced,’’ Paiewonsky said. “But that doesn’t mean that we’re not recognizing that people have places they need to get to and they have important reasons to be traveling over the bridge, so that spurs us to do the work as quickly as possible and to do everything we can to mitigate the traffic impacts.’’
Contractor J.F. White of Framingham will build a temporary bridge atop the old drawbridge. When that is finished, probably in early December, the bridge will reopen to two lanes of traffic in each direction. Workers will then demolish the drawbridge and repair the substructure. In early February, inbound lanes will close again — this time for more than two months — while workers install the new drawbridge in sections and ready it for traffic.
Much of the drawbridge work will be done from barges and cranes in the river, closing a lock through the channel favored by pleasure boaters in the summer and also used several times a day by Boston Duck Tours.
“It’s going to be challenging at best,’’ said Cindy Brown, general manager of Boston Duck Tours, whose tour drivers are well acquainted with the rusting underside of the Craigie Drawbridge. But, she said, “it’s great that they’re doing this work.’’
Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
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