CDN SMITH
Before and after: Plan for Winthrop-Edgewood stretch.
The city will soon go out to bid, again, for the long-planned and years-delayed Edgewood Cycletrack. Now the soonest cyclists can expect to ride the separated lane will be this summer.
City transit chief Doug Hausladen and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn told the Independent that the 2.1‑mile protected cycletrack that will stretch from Forest Road to Park Street hit another round of hiccups when no contractors responded to the city’s advertisement for prospective builders back in June.
Hausladen said that a number of reasons could explain why the city received no applications for the $1.2 million state-funded project last summer.
“There’s a lot of work going on in the State of Connecticut right now,” he said.
Putting out a bid package “mid-cycle” (that is, in the middle of the Spring-to-Fall construction season) for a relatively complex engineering project that involves 11 different intersections and reconfigured traffic signals on the west side of town proved to be bad timing, he said, with many potential contractors already tied up with other projects.
He and Zinn said that the city has decided to break out the bid package into two smaller projects, one focused on the required civil engineering work and one focused on the required traffic signal modification work.
“We think that will unlock some of the bid potential,” Hausladen said.
He and Zinn said that the scope of the project and the expected construction timeline have not changed since the city first went out to bid six months ago. Back in June, Zinn estimated that the cycletrack would take four to six months to build, though that construction work will not all be done continuously.
When that construction timeline starts, however, is contingent upon when the city hires a contractor or contractors for the project.
Zinn said he expects the city to start soliciting interested contractors within the next few weeks.
City staff have been promoting the cycletrack since March 2016, when they first presented the idea at a Westville neighborhood meeting.
After several more community meetings, the city earned City Plan Commission approval for the project in June 2017. That was followed by a final sign off from the city’s traffic commissioners in August 2017.
Between then and Spring 2019, the city waited and waited for final sign offs from the state Department of Transportation, which finally provided a project authorization letter and an authorization to go out to bid for construction of the cycletrack in May.
But then, with state approvals and state bonding in place, no contractors bit.
I wonder if there's any rational explanation for these kinds of delays, other than that it just hasn't been a priority of Malloy, LaMont, and Harp, who were chauffeured everywhere. Most other cities can build 100 miles of these types of bike lanes in a few months.