Arroyo Grande celebrates reopening of busy Traffic Way Bridge after months of closure
Dave Alley
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (KEYT) – Arroyo Grande is celebrating the reopening of an important and busy roadway that has been closed for several months.
On Wednesday just before 2 p.m., the Traffic Way Bridge reopened for traffic for the first time since an infrastructure project that was called the biggest in the history of the city started this past May.
“It’s very exciting,” said Cheryll Maddaloni, who lives in rural Arroyo Grande. “It’s going to really help the flow to all of those businesses down there and provide easy access to the freeway. It’ll be great. It’ll be wonderful. I’m so excited that they built it so fast.”
Over the course of the past seven months, crews completely replaced the old bridge that was nearly 100 years old.
“It was originally built in 1932, and after monitoring all of the wear and tear, we noticed that it really needed to be rebuilt,” said Downing. “It was no longer safe. We were concerned about that, so the City Council took a leadership position of having the entire bridge redone all at once. Not in phases. We wanted to be proactive, not reactive.”
The bridge, which is located on Traffic Way just off of West Branch Street, is traveled by 11,000 vehicles daily, and is an integral part of the city’s infrastructure that helps link the Village area to the southwest portion of city, including Arroyo Grande High School.
“This project was a much-needed improvement to ensure the safety of our community for decades tocome,” Arroyo Grande City Manager Matthew Downing said in a statement. “While we knew that the complete closure of the bridge was going to be impactful, the City Council’s leadership, the community’s resilience, and the staff’s dedication all contributed to this successful outcome.”
Due to the nature of the project in removing the old bridge and constructing a new one, several traffic modifcations in the nearby area were temporarily put into place that created an entirely new flow of traffic through the popular Village area.
Now, with the new bridge completed, the city said traffic measures, as well as detour routes will be removed, which will restore the traffic pattern back to normal.
“Everything that we put in is temporary,” said Downing. “Everything that we put in has to come down. There is a timeline associated with some of those pieces, so everything that the contractors put in, like the temporary signals, some of that is in Caltrans jurisdiction, so we have to take those down. They won’t let us keep them, which is perfectly fine. We have to go through a normal process like everybody else. Some of the other key aspects, like the temporary traffic circle in front of the high school, the city put in, so we are developing a removal plan of how and when we do that. Obviously, it being right in front of the high school is very impactful. We will be talking to the council about what we learned through this process, about some of the improvements that we made and why might want to bring back on a permanent basis.”
The project is slated to cost nearly $14 million with funding coming mostly from federal sources.
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