Back in August we reported that Boston Public Works engineer Para Jayasinghe was working on a proposal to reconstruct the North Washington Bridge, better known by Bostonians as the Charlestown Bridge. After sharing his plan with the Charlestown Neighborhood Council in early November, Jayasinghe’s proposal was recently complemented by a full design rendering courtesy of Rosales + Partners architect Miguel Rosales.
Should the City of Boston opt to move forward with this particular proposal, the entire project would cost in the neighborhood of an estimated $90 million. But such might be the price to pay for safety.
The rusted and creaky North Washington Bridge was opened in 1900 and has since been a steel hole in which the City of Boston has poured millions of dollars into. According to the Massachusetts Highway Division of the Department of Transportation, the North Washington Bridge is structurally deficient and has undergone multiple emergency repair projects in the past several years.
MHD puts the price tag closer to $98 million, and suggests 2016 to break ground.
BostInno reached out to MassDOT and Boston City Hall to find out more information about the project’s approval as well as any other preliminary information, and we’ll be sure to update this article upon receiving responses.
The former swing span, which turns the bridge 90-degrees to allow for the passage of vessels too large to squeeze underneath the Fort Point Channel’s Northern Avenue Bridge, is now inoperable. The two center lanes have also been closed to the public for years because of steel deterioration.
Rosales’s design looks simply amazing. Gone are the clunky trusses and corroded checkerboard sidewalks. Instead, it’s outfitted with two travel lanes in each direction with no middle divider, bike lanes separated from the road by flora, and ample sidewalk space for pedestrians and sightseers to enjoy the Charles River flowing below.
Gone, too, are the beams spanning overhead in lieu of an open-air model to allow for brightness and unobstructed vistas of either the Boston skyline or the Charlestown neighborhood itself.
A solid red line marker will indicate the Freedom Trail as it does currently.
The bike lanes, though, are arguably the most lucrative feature of the new rendering. As it stands, the bridge is without any safety features for pedestrians and the narrow sidewalks already make it difficult for foot traffic to flow both ways, let alone accommodate cyclists.
A recent street reconstruction proposal in Cambridge was noticeably lacking in its inclusion of bike safety features, suggesting that curbside parking on one side of the street become a bike lane and bus pick up and drop off by day, and typical parking by night.
It’s great, then, that Boston is poised to do more for cyclists and protect them by adding scenic buffers and a specified travel way. Should this be tapped as the final proposal, the bridge could serve as a prime example to the Greater Boston area, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and even the entire country for how best to implement streetscapes beneficial to both vehicles and bikes.
According to North End Waterfront barring any setbacks, proposal revisions or other speed bumps not foreseen, “the bridge will remain open during construction with a restricted number of traffic lanes until its expected completion in 2020.”
