15-lane bridge for Garden State Parkway

Work starts soon on a major widening and rebuild of the crucial Driscoll bridge located in the busiest section of New Jersey's Garden State Parkway to give it a capacity of 300k veh/day. The bridge of 12 narrow lanes is presently close to capacity carrying an average annual daily traffic of 220k and up to 250k at times. The works starting now will add a third span with a deck 28.2m (93ft) wide to the two spans of 18.3m (60ft) and 19m (62ft) that make up the present bridge.

The 75 percent increase in deck will be used for adding three more lanes (25% more), widening lanes from 3m (10ft) to 3.3m (11ft), and adding hard shoulder to three separate roadways.

At 15-lanes the Driscoll Bridge will then be wider by lane count than the widest bridge at present in America, the Port Authority NYNJ's George Washington Bridge, which has 14 lanes on decks of 6 and 8-lanes. It links upper Manhattan with mainland USA. The MTAB&T's Verrazano-Narrows bridge linking Brooklyn to Staten Island NY over the entrance to New York Bay has 12-lanes, the same count as the new Wilson Bridge of the Beltway under construction in the Potomac river in Washington DC. Next largest is the Oakland-San Francisco Bay bridge with 10-lanes.

    On Aug 29 2002, the New Jersey Governor's office put out a press release announcing the selection of PKF-Mark III (PFK3) Inc of Newtown PA for what it called a "$84 million construction contract to rebuild the Garden State Parkway's Driscoll bridge over the Raritan River." In fact there is no rebuilding in this contract. That will come later. This PKF contract is for the construction of the main bridging of the third span, the widening.

The New Jersey Highway Authority (NJHA) owner and operator of the Garden State Parkway this summer asked for bids for the construction of a third span. The bids were called "Driscoll Bridge Widening, Construction of Proposed Bridge No 127.2S GSP Southbound Roadway over the Raritan River."

    The project was opposed by environmentalists and transit enthusiasts, and the governor's press statement makes no mention of the widening aspect of the job. His spinmeisters call the project just a "rebuild." No news has emerged from the NJHA on the Driscoll bridge, but that is probably because the Governor likes to make the news splash.

The governor's announcement does say the project will "provide relief to the hundreds of thousand (sic) of New Jersey drivers who cross the Driscoll Bridge each day." [AADT on the Driscoll bridge is currently around 220k.] Gov McGreevey is quoted as saying that the contract demonstrates the value of project labor agreements (PLA) and as saying that $25m was saved by the PLA in this instance. Apparently the next bid, without a union agreement, was $109m?

The press release refers to the governor having announced in April (2002-04-08) what it calls "an historic and unprecedented interagency agreement" between the two major state toll agencies whereby the NJ Turnpike would contribute $135m toward the Driscoll bridge project. The NJHA itself would provide $40m. The new bridge will cost $175m. There are substantial other works separate from this PFK3 contract. Bids were requested separately this summer for Roadway Approaches & Miscellaneous Structures for the third span.

Completion is being set for 2005. After the new span opens reconstruction of the existing spans can start, a $50m job that will last until 2009.

The new bridge will be one of PFK3's largest construction projects. They built the decked NJ-29 along the river in downtown Trenton, and have done work on the DE-1 tollroad in Delaware, as well as rail, water and sewer processing works. They are employee-owned and based north of Philadelphia.

Details

The Driscoll bridge which spans a shipping channel of the Raritan River is being widened from 12 lanes (two roadways of 6-lanes) to 15 lanes to form three roadways of 4,4 and 7-lanes plus full shoulders both sides of each roadway. Lane widths will go from about 3m (10ft) to 3.3m (11ft).

Bids were sought this summer for construction of a new third span 28.3m wide (93ft) - to eventually carry seven lanes southbound. The structure will be 1,335m (4379ft) long rising to provide for a navigable channel clearance of 41m (135ft). Design was done by a DMJM/URS joint venture of two alternates:

(1) a steel plate girder bridge of 27 spans ranging between 34m (112ft) and 76m (250ft)

(2) a concrete segmental box girder bridge of 21 spans ranging between 52m (170ft) and 79m (260ft) length

Bids were sought allowing either. Normally steel plate girder, like the existing bridge, would win hands down in a contest like this on the east coast of the US, but the Bush administration has had US steel markets in turmoil with its pandering to protectionist lobbyists. Suddenly local suppliers cannot meet demand. Honda has been using huge Russian Antonov freighters to fly in steel coil from Asia to keep its US car factories in steel. This steel chaos made concrete an attractive alternative for bridges at present, according to bridge people, but as we go to press it is unclear what material will be used. [We'll guess steel.] The third span deck will be built just a foot distant from the second span but the piers will be connected.

    The Governor's announcement also said that project management for the Driscoll bridge project would be done by "DMJM & Harris of Iselin" for $9.5m. (That is a local office. The parent company now known as Aecom is based in Los Angeles.)

Due to open by 2005 the new third span will carry a mix of south and northbound traffic while the old spans undergo a $50m to $60m rehab including redecking. There will follow an elaborately choreographed lane switching and redecking. There have been some segments of deck crumble and fall, the Governor's office says. Without the new span redecking would be impossible without major congestion.

    The first span was built with an 18.3m (60ft) deck and opened in 1955 striped for 2x2-lanes. Because of the unexpectedly large traffic load it was restriped to 2x3 lanes in 1957. In 1972 a second span was opened and each span was restriped to carry 5 lanes. Restriping to eliminate shoulders to provide the present six lanes each direction with lanes barely 3m (10ft) wide occurred in the early 1980s.

When complete the existing spans will cater for 2x4 3.3m (11ft) travel lanes divided northbound with a pair of breakdown shoulders each. The middle span will take traffic destined for north of the New Jersey Turnpike/NJ-440, US-9 interchanges - through traffic. The outside old span will take 4-lanes of traffic headed for these local interchanges.

The bridge is located at MP-127 between the Jersey shore part of the parkway and the northern part, which traverses the intensely developed northern New Jersey area. The bridge is immediately south of important transitions to other major highways including I-287, US-9, US-1, NJ-440, and the New Jersey Turnpike (I-95) forming the most complex set of interchange movements in the state in a distance of about 6km (3.7 miles).

The bridge was for a long time known as the Raritan Bay Bridge but was renamed after NJ Governor Alfred E. Driscoll, a great New Jersey statesman. The major theme of Gov Driscoll's inaugural address in 1947 was the vital importance of building the highways that are now called the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway. And Driscoll got the whole of the Turnpike designed, financed and built within the four year term of his administration! It was such a success the follow-up with the GSP was unstoppable. In a period of about eight years these giants of roadbuilding laid down 190km (118mi) of the Turnpike and 264km (164mi) of the Parkway, a total of 454km (282mi) of superhighway, as it was then known..)

BACKGROUND: The Garden State Parkway, opened in July 1955 and with a later extension to the NY state line is now 278km (173mi) long. It traverses the state from north to south through varied environments. At the southern end it starts with remote fishing villages at Cape May at the mouth of Delaware Bay and then extends past the many coastal resort towns and suburban communities of the Jersey Atlantic shore, then rises high over the Raritan River shipping channel and through the middle of northern NJ with its huge concentration of ports, chemical and petroleum complexes, warehousing, and service industries. At its northern end it connects with the New York State Thruway near Spring Valley NY. The width of the road ranges between 2x2-lanes and 14-lanes with four roadways (carriageways).

Trucks defined as over 3.2t (7,000pd) gross weight, over 4 wheels or 3 axles are not permitted on the parkway north of MP-105 as the parkway transitions between its coastal route and the more inland route in northern NJ. The Garden State Parkway is America's busiest single tollroad in terms of toll transaction numbers - 609m in 2001 or 1.67m/day average. With 11 mainline barrier plazas and 19 ramp plazas it caters to an estimated 409m trips or 1.12m/day. Like the New Jersey Turnpike and Highway 401 in Toronto it has major stretches of 8-lane and greater roadway with substantial 12-lane length in four separate roadways (carriageways). Its greatest width in travel lanes is 14 but with the bridge widening this will go to 15.

Toll collection which costs about $37m or 7c/transaction is about equally split between cash and electronic (E-ZPass). The GSP was the first tollroad in the country to install automatic coin machines just several years after it opened. With the advent of ET token sales were discontinued and usage of the machines is now by coin only. The NJHA has just over 400 toll collectors.

It is also among the cheapest tollroads with cash toll rates unchanged since 1989 at 35c or 1.4c/km (2.2c/mi). Commuter toll rates however increased slightly this summer with the elimination of transponder toll discounts. At these toll rates the NJHA cannot service the debt on major new capital works. Recent governors have flatly rejected moves to increase tolls. [see www.gspkwy.state.nj.us, members/aol.com/GSPFan/parkway.htm, www.nycroads.com] TRnews 2003-01-06