The Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, was the model for the Washington Avenue Bridge. Photo: AP via The Guardian

The 14th-century Italian bridge that inspired it has withstood the ravages of time, World War II and a 1966 flood, but the 42-year-old Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis might not be strong enough to hold up pedestrians, Hennepin County officials decided last week.

That’s after engineers at URS Corp. started work on readying the Washington Avenue Bridge to carry trains running along the planned Central Corridor line between Minneapolis and St. Paul. It’s widely expected that the bridge will need beefing up to support new rail traffic, but the necessity for remedial work to support existing pedestrian and bicycle traffic came as a surprise.

The county restricted walking and biking to the sheltered structure that runs down the center of the bridge’s upper level — only days before the start of the University of Minnesota’s fall semester, as crowds of students begin to cross the bridge on foot or bike to travel between the university’s East Bank and West Bank Minneapolis campuses.

Motor vehicle traffic on the bridge’s lower level wasn’t affected.

The move follows a string of bridge failures and closings in Minnesota over the past year. Most recently, bike and pedestrian traffic was forced to blend atop the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis when the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board let the Red Bull energy drink company block the bike lanes along the bridge’s middle portion with 25 eight-foot cubes for most of July as part of a marketing event, with several minor injuries reported due to collisions.

If URS has a familiar ring, it may be because the firm conducted inspections of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Preliminary results of reviews of the I-35W bridge collapse have revealed flaws not caught by those reviews, though the firm initially pressed MnDOT to approve extensive repair work.

Work to make the Washington Avenue Bridge strong enough to support people walking or riding bikes along its edges will continue well into next year. Temporary bike lanes under the overhanging eaves of the bridge’s upper-level sheltered walkway are now under construction.

The current state of the Central Corridor light rail transit debate: Mix half-baked engineering with overheated funding threats and watch as public opinion congeals around a premature choice. Both dailies ran editorials Sunday extolling an at-grade Washington Avenue route and excoriating the University of Minnesota for insisting on taking a hard look at alternatives to closing the busy cross-campus thoroughfare to all traffic. The opinion leaders led with the same foot and danced the same steps, with small differences. The PiPress chose an odd metaphor that required picturing the U of M driving a gold stake through its own heart, while the Strib  urged the U to hurry up and get “comfortable with the only real option that remains.” 

The tug of war between the university and the Metropolitan Council over the route has played out behind the governor’s game of chicken with the Legislature over Central Corridor funding. Longtime residents who know the area best have made reasonable arguments for and against the closure of Washington Avenue SE. But after last week’s revelation that engineers mismeasured the route’s length in the university area by 1,300 feet, residents are understandably resistant to glib guesstimates that yet-to-be-determined mitigation will take care of any problems created by forcing 20,000-25,000 vehicles per day onto neighborhood streets not built for speed. Memories of choked local roads after last year’s I-35W collapse (pictured) are far too fresh for campus-area denizens to simply swallow the Strib’s assurance that “a plan is in the works to cushion the surrounding neighborhood from ill effects from the diversion of auto traffic.” 

Last week Gov. Tim Pawlenty got an LRT committee’s final decision delayed by seven days to give the university one last chance to fall in line with “the creative thinkers in charge of the Central Corridor line,” as the Strib calls them. High noon for the U will come at 1 p.m. Wednesday when the Central Corridor Management Committee convenes a special meeting in the Metropolitan Council’s chamber. Three hours later the Met Council gathers in the same room, with “Central Corridor Light Rail Trail Alignment” on its agenda.