Assembly lines are rolling as crews begin to replace 21 Northeast Pennsylvania bridges this summer under a unique new state Department of Transportation program to fast-track upgrades to its deteriorating bridge network.
The Rapid Bridge Replacement Project, a public-private partnership between PennDOT and Pittsburgh-based Plenary Walsh Keystone Partners, calls for replacing 558 aging bridges throughout the state, including 46 in Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, Pike, Susquehanna, Wayne and Wyoming counties.
Map: Rapid Bridge Repair Project
The $899 million project uses a single design that can be adapted to similar bridges and relies heavily on mass-producing many major bridge components to maximize speed and create an economy of scale from bundling, said Dan Galvin, a spokesman for Plenary Walsh.
During the Rapid Bridge Replacement Project, the consortium of private businesses will finance, design, replace and maintain the bridges for 25 years while PennDOT gradually compensates Plenary Walsh.
PennDOT’s goal is to speed up the Commonwealth’s efforts to fix its nearly 4,000 aging bridges. Statewide, crews will replace the 558 fast-tracked bridges between now and November 2017.
Some of the projects have already started in Northeast Pennsylvania, like in Buckingham Twp., Wayne County — where crews tore down the 81-year-old bridge carrying Starlight Lake Road over Shehawken Creek.
The rural bridge was small — just 32 feet long. It was traveled sparsely, by just 225 vehicles a day on average. And, it was old and structurally deficient — PennDOT terminology to describe bridges with significant deterioration to one or more of its major components. While the bridge was still standing, inspectors rated it 48 on a scale to 100, and restricted the weight of vehicles driving over it. Lower ratings mean poorer conditions.
All of those factors make it a prime pick for the rapid replacement project.
“The bigger a bridge is, the longer it takes to rebuild it,” said Dan Galvin, a spokesman for Plenary Walsh. “When most bridges are similar-sized, it’s a lot easier to mass-produce the materials to replace them.”
Planners also targeted bridges with minimal right-of-way issues and little potential for environmental concerns that could bog down a project, said Erin Waters-Trasatt, PennDOT’s deputy press secretary.
Among the 558 bridges to be replaced under the project:
• 411 are single-span bridges, 27 are multi-span and 120 are culverts.
• 496 are less than 100 feet long; 62 are longer than 100 feet.
• After reconstruction, the average length of the bridges will be 60 feet.
Most of the bridges being replaced were built in the 1920s to 1940s, although the oldest bridge — in Montgomery County — was built in 1880, Mr. Galvin said.
Northeast Pennsylvania’s share of bridge replacements fit the broader trend, with most projects concentrated in less-heavily-traveled rural areas.
The more urban Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, with a combined population of more than 535,000, account for just three of 46 bridge replacements.
The Lackawanna County bridge carries Edella Road over Interstate 81 in South Abington Twp. Its replacement is scheduled to run from March-August 2016.
In Luzerne County, one bridge carries state Route 115 over Shades Creek in Bear Creek Twp. The other runs over Interstate 80 in Butler Twp.
Meanwhile, Susquehanna, Wayne, Wyoming, Pike and Monroe counties, with a combined 351,000 residents, have 43 bridges on the fast-track list.
PennDOT’s normal process for prioritizing road and bridge projects typically takes average daily traffic into account, and many of the bridges would have waited more than a decade without the rapid replacement project.
“Most of them, we wouldn’t have gotten to for 10 for 15 years through our normal process,” Ms. Waters-Trasatt said.
Even though fewer motorists travel over them, the bridges are just as important to those who live there and the local economy, Mr. Galvin said. Bridges with weight restrictions can complicate emergency response efforts if, for example, a fire truck is heavier than the weight limit, he said.
Unique program
Other states, like Virginia and Missouri, have tried large-scale public-private partnerships for transportation infrastructure repairs or replacements, but Pennsylvania’s fledgling program is unique.
“The best we can tell, no one has done this quite to this level in the United States,” Mr. Galvin said.
Virginia, which started its program in 1995, uses it for large-scale projects like the $1.4 billion construction of express lanes on the Capital Beltway between July 2008 and November 2012. Private companies often collect money from tolls after the project is over, while PennDOT is paying contractors directly over time.
While the beltway project is among the success stories Virginia officials highlight, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced earlier this month his administration reached a settlement with contractors to close the book on a U.S. Route 460 project that was canceled amid environmental complications.
The deal returned $46 million in already-spent funds to the state and canceled an additional $103 million claim the company filed under the contract for the project designed to improve safety and efficiency of the highway in Southeast Virginia.
The Virginia governor announced the deal at a ceremonial bill signing for a law designed to improve the state’s public-private partnership program by better screening potential projects before approval and transferring risk from the taxpayers to private companies.
Farther west, Missouri officials initially proposed an initiative to overhaul bridges all over the state, much like Pennsylvania’s project, but had to change the details significantly when credit markets melted down in 2008.
Despite the setback, contractors still replaced 554 bridges and rehabilitated another 248 under the $685 million “Safe and Sound” program that ran from 2009 to 2012, said Robert Brendel, a Missouri Department of Transportation spokesman.
Missouri also targeted smaller bridges and focused on standardized designs with prefabricated parts, he said. Throughout the project, the average bridge closure lasted about 42 days, half of the usual closure period.
Mr. Brendel described Missouri’s initiative as a successful model for other states. However, Missouri’s list of structurally-deficient bridges continues to grow annually.
“We had a huge inventory of deficient bridges and were struggling to get ahead of the curve,” Mr. Brendel said. “Now with a few years past, we’re about back where we were.”
Pennsylvania planners can relate to the problem.
No matter how many bridges PennDOT fixes, about 250 more become structurally deficient each year, Ms. Waters-Trasatt said.
Just to reach the national average number of structurally-deficient bridges — about 2,700 — Pennsylvania would have to repair or replace around 400 bridges a year for around a decade, she said.
Regardless of how many bridges Pennsylvania’s $2.3 billion transportation funding package will fix over the next decade, the Rapid Bridge Replacement Program will help clear the backlog by 558 and take care of bridges like the one in Buckingham Twp. that would have languished.
“I can’t predict the timeline, but it certainly would have been a longer time period,” said Craig Rickard, director of the Wayne County Department of Planning. “There is only so much money to go around.”
Contact the writer: kwind@timesshamrock.com, @kwindTT on Twitter