MassDOT to Reschedule Public Hearing for Mystic River Car-Free Bridge Project
Update: On Monday afternoon, hours before the meeting was scheduled to begin, MassDOT announced that “this meeting has been canceled and will be rescheduled for a later date.” The hearing will now be held on June 24 at Somerville High School.
MassDOT has cancelled a planned public hearing this evening in Somerville for a car-free bridge over the Mystic River, from Draw Seven Park in Somerville to the Encore Casino riverwalk in Everett.
The meeting had previously been scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. at the Mass. General Brigham office building in Somerville, but late Monday afternoon, MassDOT announced that the event had been postponed, and that “a new date will be announced soon.”
The proposed bridge would essentially extend the Northern Strand Trail over the Mystic River to connect to the Assembly district and existing riverfront path systems in Somerville and Boston:
The state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) had previously been managing the project, but that agency had been struggling to get it through the planning stages.
Over the winter, MassDOT took over the project, and has reportedly redesigned the bridge with a wider bridge deck to accommodate more foot and bike traffic.
The initial design for the bridge, which dates to early 2018, called for building a 12-foot-wide bridge deck. But in the six years since then, a boom in real estate development proposals for the Everett side of the river have considerably increased traffic forecasts for the proposed bridge.
At a March presentation in Somerville, MassDOT project manager William Conroy reported that the new bridge design would provide a wider, 18-foot deck, and that the project would go under construction before the end of 2026.
More Mystic River greenways in the works
In the past two weeks, StreetsblogMASS has reported on several other projects that are in the works that would extend the trail networks along the banks of the Mystic River.
To the south, MassDOT is reconstructing two bridges near Sullivan Square that would create protected bike paths and improved sidewalks and crosswalks from Sullivan Square to East Somerville and the Assembly district.
And further upriver, another MassDOT project in the planning stages could upgrade the connections between the Mystic River and Main Street in Medford Square:
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