A project to build a new car-free bridge over the Mystic River between Everett and Somerville is under new management, and undergoing design changes that will likely delay its construction further into the future.
The proposed bridge would extend the Northern Strand Trail from its current endpoint next to the Encore Casino, bringing it across the river to the Assembly Square district and its Orange Line station in Somerville.
Until recently, the state's Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) had been managing the project. In the summer of 2023, officials affiliated with that agency told StreetsblogMASS that the bridge would be under contract "at the end of the calendar year."
That didn't happen, and when we reached out to the DCR for an update earlier this month, a press official told us that MassDOT had taken over the project.
MassDOT's press office subsequently told us that the agency was "evaluating bridge design changes to reflect public comment calling for reconsideration of bridge width and other design elements, and to ease construction and future maintenance of the bridge."
"MassDOT anticipates bringing an updated design to the public within the next several months," they added.
Increasing development in Everett prompts wider bridge design
The earlier design for the bridge, which dates to early 2018, called for building a 12-foot-wide pathway across the river.
That design would have been considerably narrower than other shared-use pathway bridges the state has built in recent years. For instance, MassDOT's Bruce Freeman Rail Trail bridge over Route 2 in Concord, built in 2022, is 16 feet wide.
Many local advocacy groups weighed in with concerns that the bridge should be wider, especially for the volumes of bike and pedestrian traffic that the bridge was expected to carry.
At the time, the new Encore Casino was expected to be the primary destination for most of the new bridge's foot traffic.
In the half-decade since then, though, a massive fossil-fueled power plant across the street from the casino has shut down, and ExxonMobil sold off its field of oil tanks nearby. Developers have released ambitious plans to build thousands of new homes, high-rise office buildings, and a new soccer stadium in their place – all of which would add considerably more traffic on the proposed bridge.
"We haven’t seen a design yet, but I’ve heard that the width would be quite a bit bigger," Jay Monty, the City of Everett's Director of Transportation and Mobility, told StreetsblogMASS earlier this month. "The downside is that the schedule is nowhere close to what we'd hoped."
Going back to the drawing board means that the project is likely several years from starting construction – and it may need to scrape together more funding as well.
"It's problematic for us because a lot of the development that we’re talking about may well happen before (the bridge opens), and this bridge is really critical to all that happening," said Monty.
