There are still structures to be demolished, designs to be drawn up and a bridge to be built. But the Francis Scott Key Bridge rebuild now has federal environmental approval, one of many steps before the replacement span will again stand above the Patapsco River.
All federally funded transportation projects must be analyzed for their environmental impacts, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, and constructing a new bridge, for example, can require years of study. But as a replacement bridge to be constructed on the same footprint and with the same number of lanes as the collapsed span, the rebuilt structure will avoid a yearslong analysis of alternatives, enabling its completion more quickly than it would otherwise.
The transportation authority hopes to select the builder by Labor Day, and the new bridge is projected to open to traffic by Oct. 2028.
The Maryland Transportation Authority, the bridge’s owner, said in a news release Tuesday that it has received NEPA approval and a “categorical exclusion” — meaning it will not need an in-depth environmental analysis — from the Federal Highway Administration.
The categorical exclusion “continues our commitment to restoring this vital connector as quickly and safely as possible and is in accordance with [NEPA], since the replacement bridge will be constructed completely within the collapsed bridge’s right-of-way and will not increase the capacity of the former bridge,” the FHWA said Tuesday in a statement.
Maryland Secretary of Transportation Paul Wiedefeld called the approval a “major milestone” in a statement.
“This approval from the federal government formally gives MDTA the go ahead to move forward with plans to rebuild the Key Bridge,” he stated.
Although the new span will be built upon the same center line as the old one, which was knocked down by a container ship in March, it will be a structurally different bridge. It will also have updated safety features — such as wider shoulders and improved pier protection from vessel collision — given that it must satisfy a nationwide bridge code that has been revised in the half-century since the span was first constructed.
“The bridge was two lanes in each direction. It will continue to be two lanes in each direction. There will be no additional capacity. We will, however, be bringing the bridge up to today’s safety standards,” Melissa Williams, the authority’s director of planning and program development, said in an interview.
Some observers have suggested that the new span, which is expected to last past the year 2100, should carry more vehicular lanes to prepare for a potential increase in traffic in coming decades. Planning for such a span, though, would have required further analysis, which could have slowed the rebuild by years, transportation authority officials said. (The authority is currently examining the potential of a new Chesapeake Bay crossing. That ongoing NEPA study was launched two years ago.)
In recent decades, daily traffic on the Key Bridge has not steeply increased, according to data from the FHWA’s National Bridge Inventory. Plus, the bridge carried significantly fewer vehicles per lane, per day (7,692) in 2019 than either of the Bay Bridge’s two spans: That bridge’s west-bound span, with three lanes, carried 13,038 vehicles per lane, per day, and the east-bound span, with two lanes, carried 19,292.
Part of the rebuild process is weighing “the immediacy of the need” compared with the long-term, transportation authority Executive Director Bruce Gartner said in an interview. Had there been a multi-year NEPA process, perhaps a wider bridge would have built, he said, but the replacement “is going to be a good solution for the region for quite a long time.”
Whether the new bridge will have any pedestrian or bike lanes is yet to be determined, Gartner said, but including them would require additional environmental analysis.
“It’s a conversation we’re going to have to have with the region about the benefits, what the existing network is on either side of the bridge versus the additional time and cost to put that in, which we really haven’t figured out any of that,” he said.
The vast majority of federal highway projects are deemed a “categorical exclusion,” which FHWA Administrator Shailen Bhatt noted during a Key Bridge hearing on July 10 of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Republican from Nebraska, asked Bhatt about environmental permitting, noting “it’s important that we get this done as quickly as possible.”
“What we will do is we will issue a categorical exclusion,” Bhatt said at the time, “because we’re replacing a bridge in essentially the same footprint as the preexisting one.”
Teams of builders submitted proposals for the bridge, expected to cost $1.7 billion, to the transportation authority last month and the authority expects to select a team by Labor Day, Gartner said. Demolition of the remaining structures is expected to begin this fall.
The federal government will pay for at least 90% of the new bridge, but Maryland’s congressional leaders have sought full funding via legislative action, which would save the state of Maryland roughly $170 million. The FHWA said in a statement Tuesday it “remains fully committed to supporting Congressional action to fund the full cost of the new bridge.”
