MONTAGUE — The rehabilitation of the General Pierce Bridge has been bumped up six months on the state’s to-do list, apparently in response to complaints about the timeline and project details from Greenfield and Montague officials.
Yet the new timeline has prompted concern that preliminary construction may overlap work at the Fifth Street pedestrian bridge this September, possibly causing traffic issues in downtown Turners Falls.
“It’s a great thing that these projects are all happening,” said Montague Town Administrator Steve Ellis. “It’s inconvenient that the timing may cause some conflict.”
The General Pierce Bridge project is scheduled to take three years, during which time the bridge will be totally closed to vehicle traffic, but still accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists.
The bridge has been reduced to one-way-at-a-time traffic since June 2019. The rehabilitation was announced at a public forum held in early February by the state Department of Transportation (MassDOT), which manages the General Pierce.
Originally, the bridge was scheduled to be closed for construction from summer 2021 through summer 2024. Now, it has been rescheduled to start and end six months earlier, putting the bridge’s closure for construction in December 2020, Ellis said.
Ellis said the change seemed to be a response to a letter the Selectboard sent to MassDOT the week after the February forum, listing improvements to the General Pierce that the board said should have been in the plan.
Notably, the board’s letter mentioned that the bridge needed to be stripped and repainted, that lights should be installed as a matter of safety and of aesthetics, and that the project should be expedited to minimize its impact on the local business economy.
MassDOT dismissed the points that would have expanded the scope of the project’s design, Ellis said, but told him that the project was on schedule, and that there would likely be an incentive for early completion.
Yet the six months’ improvement may cause new issues with traffic in Turners Falls this September, as work on a project related to the General Pierce is now likely to overlap with a different project of replacing the Fifth Street pedestrian bridge in the Canal District, Ellis said.
Part of MassDOT’s General Pierce project is to add extra turning lanes to the Turners Falls-Gill Bridge, to accommodate the extra traffic the bridge will likely be getting in the three years the General Pierce is closed.
Meanwhile, Montague is planning this summer to replace the Fifth Street pedestrian bridge, which was closed in summer 2017 when the state found that it was no longer up to code.
An important period for that project, Ellis said, will be the week of Sept. 14, when the canal is scheduled to be drained for maintenance. The Fifth Street vehicle bridge won’t be closed at this point, but its traffic flow will likely be somewhat controlled and slowed down, he said.
In the new timeline for the General Pierce, work on the Turners Falls-Gill Bridge will likely overlap with the traffic reduction on the Fifth Street Bridge, Ellis told the Selectboard.
“That could mean there are two choke points in the two primary ways in and out of town,” he said.
Coincidentally, Montague is also making modifications this summer to the end of the Turners Falls-Gill Bridge that feeds into Turners Falls. These are intended to slow traffic coming into town from Route 2, and will primarily be bumps at the end of the bridge and a new crosswalk.
These are scheduled for this summer, and had been planned before the General Pierce project was announced.
Reach Max Marcus at
mmarcus@recorder.com
or 413-930-4231.