With Another $1 Billion Pledge From Washington, MassDOT Can Almost Afford Sagamore Bridge Replacement

On Friday afternoon, the Healey-Driscoll administration and the Commonwealth’s congressional delegation announced that Washington had pledged a new grant of “nearly $1 billion” to help finance the replacement of the Sagamore Bridge in Bourne.

The funding will come from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s Bridge Investment Program (BIP).

The grant award supplements $372 million in federal funding that the U.S. Department of Transportation had already pledged in December from another grant program, and a pledge from Governor Healey to borrow $700 million in state bond debt, which future Massachusetts taxpayers would pay off with interest.

MassDOT expects its Sagamore Bridge replacement will cost about $2.1 billion.

The 2024 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act committed an additional $350 million for the Sagamore and Bourne bridge replacements. MassDOT has not yet made a determination about how that funding would be split between the two bridge projects.

“We’ve never been closer to rebuilding the Cape Cod Bridges than we are right now,” said Governor Maura Healey in a press statement.

StreetsblogMASS has reached out to MassDOT to confirm the details of the project’s financing and schedule, and will update this story when we learn more.

Bourne Bridge replacement still faces multi-billion-dollar funding gap

MassDOT’s original “Cape Cod Bridge program” would have attempted to replace both the Bourne and Sagamore bridges in one project, at a cost of over $4.5 billion.

In addition to building new, 6-lane replacements for both the Sagamore and the nearby Bourne Bridge – each of which would be nearly twice as wide as the existing 4-lane bridges – MassDOT had also proposed to add more lanes to connecting highways like Route 6, add more lanes to local streets like Sandwich Road, build a new mile-long bypass road, widen intersections, and build multiple new highway-style interchanges on both sides of the canal.

In 2023, in light of the Commonwealth’s unsuccessful efforts to finance that mega-project, the Healey administration announced a scaled-back, “phased” approach that would focus on replacing the Sagamore Bridge first.

More recent project plans have cut out some of the highway expansions proposed in earlier iterations, although plans still call for large, high-speed highway interchanges on both sides of the Cape Cod Canal for both of the new bridges.