DOT says temporary bridge in Bristol is too costly

DOT Director hopes state can improve traffic through the rest of Bristol before closing Silver Creek Bridge

By Kristen Ray
Posted 5/30/19

The Rhode Island Department of Transportation (DOT) could build a temporary bridge to keep Hope Street traffic flowing above Silver Creek next summer, but won’t because it would cost too much. …

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DOT says temporary bridge in Bristol is too costly

DOT Director hopes state can improve traffic through the rest of Bristol before closing Silver Creek Bridge

Posted

The Rhode Island Department of Transportation (DOT) could build a temporary bridge to keep Hope Street traffic flowing above Silver Creek next summer, but won’t because it would cost too much. Also, the agency is planning a thorough review of Metacom Avenue traffic signals and traffic flow before it closes Route 114 for six to eight weeks in 2020, hoping it can make the rest of Bristol better before it makes the downtown district temporarily worse.

Those were the two biggest revelations from a sit-down interview with DOT Director Peter Alviti inside the Phoenix offices last week.

Mr. Alviti acknowledged that he has been listening to the noise coming from Bristol recently, as business leaders and private citizens suggest an array of alternatives to completely blocking traffic along Route 114, but he and his team have politely rejected all of them, and their own.

For weeks, people have asked, “Why can’t they just build a temporary bridge?”

According to Mr. Alviti, the DOT technically could. But they don’t feel they can justify the expense.

“For an eight-week project of limited scope, the additional cost was just not proportionate to the project itself,” Mr. Alviti said.

Though he understands there will be a negative impact on Bristol and some of its downtown businesses, Mr. Alviti said he has to taken into account the bigger picture — making decisions that, ultimately, will have the benefit of the entire state in mind.

Since 2015, the DOT has been working on RhodeWorks, a 10-year, $5 billion-plus journey to improve Rhode Island’s infrastructure, steadily correcting 50 years’ worth of neglect. In this year alone, the DOT will be working to repair, replace and/or conduct preservation activities on 177 different bridges statewide; by the end of 2025, that number jumps to more than 1,100.

“It’s a pretty ambitious program,” Mr. Alviti said.

In order for the system to keep working smoothly — in four years, they have managed to achieve an on-time, on-budget completion rate of more than 90 percent — Mr. Alviti said they need to spend every dollar wisely. Increasing the budget on one project, like the Silver Creek Bridge, for example, could severely impact the success of another one down the road, he said.

“Our challenge is not letting the perfect get in the way of the good.”

Easing the impact

As with any sort of construction project, there will always be a certain level of suffering involved; that Mr. Alviti expects. But Mr. Alviti also hopes DOT can make things better by improving congestion headaches on Metacom Avenue, the major detour route once the Silver Creek project commences. To that, he pointed to a success story in the Olneyville area of Providence.

Before breaking ground on the DOT’s largest design-build job to date last fall, the Route 6/10 project, Mr. Alviti made a point to examine the already existing traffic woes in Olneyville, an area where detoured traffic would be sent. Upon closer inspection, they discovered a deficiency in the traffic signals’ overall effectiveness in managing travel flow. Mr. Alviti said they improved things to the point that traffic, including the additional detoured traffic, moved better than it did before work began.

“The sequencing was so off, that all the gridlock they’d been experiencing in Olneyville was probably unnecessary,” Mr. Alviti said.

In light of those results, Mr. Alviti is hopeful that a similar study on Metacom Avenue within the next several months will yield similar results and, in turn, remove any fears that the town will turn to gridlock.

“If what we did in Olneyville is a model for what we may be able to do here, we may have the solution in and of itself just along that corridor,” he said.

As they push forward in fine-tuning the plans for the Silver Creek Bridge project and work toward reducing its overall impact on the community, Mr. Alviti welcomes the criticisms and concerns raised by the people of Bristol; in his eyes, those kinds of conversations can only be used to the DOT’s benefit.

“It’s to create the feedback loops that make it all better.”

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A lifelong Portsmouth resident, Jim graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1982 and earned a journalism degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1986. He's worked two different stints at East Bay Newspapers, for a total of 18 years with the company so far. When not running all over town bringing you the news from Portsmouth, Jim listens to lots and lots and lots of music, watches obscure silent films from the '20s and usually has three books going at once. He also loves to cook crazy New Orleans dishes for his wife of 25 years, Michelle, and their two sons, Jake and Max.