During the day, traffic on the New Bedford-Fairhaven bridge comes to a halt once an hour.
The 120-year-old steel bridge slowly spins 90 degrees until it’s perpendicular to the road, opening up a pair of narrow channels on both sides for fishing boats and barges to squeeze through.
Cars don’t start moving again until the bridge groans back into place. The whole process stops traffic for an average of about 12 to 23 minutes depending on how many boats are steaming by, according to a recent navigational study submitted to the Coast Guard.
Getting stuck at the bridge is part of life in New Bedford and Fairhaven, a pair of blue-collar communities straddling the nation’s most lucrative fishing port. It feels only natural that one’s view while sitting in traffic is a parade of trawlers, scallopers and lobster boats.
“The first time I was caught in the bridge traffic I thought, ‘Well isn’t this quaint?’” said William Straus, a state representative whose district includes Fairhaven. “Here’s this beautiful, older design bridge and this is really interesting.”
“By the second time,” Straus said, “the quaintness had worn off.”
Aside from being slow to open, the New Bedford-Fairhaven bridge is also getting old and worn out. Construction on the bridge began in 1899, and it opened just a few years later. Politicians have been commissioning studies about how to replace it since 1965.
But no one got close to building a new bridge until 2022, when Straus and other New Bedford state legislators secured a $100 million transportation bond authorization.
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation is now developing a detailed proposal for a bridge replacement before legislators go back to the governor to ask her to issue the bond.
“You can’t even be in the room asking for the money unless you have a project that’s been designed, gone through the public consensus process and has the permits,” Straus said.
Last Thursday, MassDOT officials presented a bare bones rendering of the type of bridge they want to build. A pair of new steel towers would essentially lift a stretch of road up like an elevator. The new vertical lift bridge would open faster than the current swing bridge and create a navigational channel that’s twice as wide, enabling boats to pass through faster and traffic to get moving sooner.
But at first glance, city officials didn’t like that the vertical lift design creates a 138-foot height limit for all the boats passing underneath.
Gordon Carr, executive director of the New Bedford Port Authority, said the height limit could prevent new industries from bringing taller ships and taller cargo into the upper harbor one day.
Still, Carr said the city realizes that other bridge designs might shut down car traffic for three to five years during construction, forcing drivers to head more than a mile north for detours. For the vertical lift bridge, construction is projected to stop car traffic for only a year or a year and a half. MassDOT officials said marine traffic could continue throughout the construction process except during “occasional outages.”
“Regrettably, this is the best available option,” Carr said.
Many of the roughly 40 people who participated in Thursday’s virtual meeting seemed to accept the vertical lift bridge as a practical option. New Bedford residents Elise Rapoza still objected to the way the bridge currently looks in the renderings.
“There are more recently designed and constructed vertical lift bridges that aren’t nearly so ugly and depressing looking,” Rapoza said.
MassDOT officials assured Rapoza that the current renderings are only a rough sketch to give people a sense of what a vertical lift bridge looks like. The department recently hired an architecture firm in San Francisco, T.Y. Lin, to come up with a more attractive design.
New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell said the renderings shared by MassDOT on Thursday reveal that the design “still has a long way to go.”
“Today’s residents, along with their children and grandchildren, deserve a bridge whose design signals to everyone that our region is an important place,” Mitchell said in a prepared statement. “Recently, I spoke to state Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbetts-Nutt about the importance of the bridge’s appearance. I am grateful that she is equally committed to building a bridge whose design meets our region’s high standards.”
MassDOT officials said the next step in the process will be presenting a partial bridge design for further public feedback. The team that presented Thursday did not offer a timeline for when that might happen.