Charlotte City Council approved a $16.3 million bid from Blythe Construction Inc. to build a pedestrian bridge across Interstate 277 near Uptown Charlotte, a key connection for the Charlotte Rail Trail that has been more than 20 years in the works.
Renderings show 40-foot-tall double arches on either side of the bridge’s 280-foot length, the bridge connects more than 40 miles of bike lanes in Charlotte’s Center City. The freestanding bridge will be built adjacent to Charlotte’s LYNX Blue Line rail bridge between South Boulevard and South College Street.
Funded by a combination of the city, county, North Carolina Department of Transportation and private contributions, including US Bank, the work will include a 16-foot-wide concrete bike and pedestrian path, walls of containment and levels, according to the town hall of January 13. schedule The contract is still subject to NCDOT approval.
Scheduled for completion in the second quarter of 2028, plans for the bridge, which will connect Charlotte’s South End and Uptown neighborhoods, were included as a key component in the city’s South End Vision Plan adopted by the ‘city hall in 2018, according to Charlotte Rail Trail. .
In May 2019, the Charlotte City Council voted to authorize a $1.2 million contract with Thomas & Hutton Engineering for the bridge, one year after it authorized research for the $11 million project.
But the pedestrian bridge next to the LYNX Blue Line dates to the early 2000s, according to the city’s agenda for that funding approval, which says the city removed the pedestrian bridge from a 2004 LYNX project as a cost-saving measure.
In 2018, 500,000 people, an average of 2,000 each day, used Charlotte’s Rail Trail, a 3.5-mile pedestrian path that connects various Charlotte neighborhoods to the city’s Uptown core. It ends abruptly near I-277, where the pedestrian bridge is planned, before starting again closer to Uptown.
At a meeting on June 4, 2018, Dan Gallagher, then-deputy director of the Charlotte Department of Transportation, explained that a pedestrian connection across I-277 had been missing since 2006, when construction was completed of the LYNX blue line. He urged the council at the time to go ahead with the project, which he said was part of a wider plan to create a network of bicycle and pedestrian carriageways across the city.
