The Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission will host an open house from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 3, on a series of construction activities to be conducted along I-95 in Lower Makefield Township, Pa., next year in advance of the Scudder Falls bridge replacement project. The event will be at the William Penn Middle School, 1524 Derbyshire Road, Yardley, Pa.,
A focus of the session will be noise-abatement walls that the commission has committed to install along eligible sections of the I-95 corridor on the bridge’s Pennsylvania side. Among other things, residents who attend the open house will be asked to choose from three options for what the residential side of the noise walls should look like.
The commission will provide information about land-clearing activities to be conducted this winter in advance of the wall installation in the spring.
At viewing stations, the public may examine project concepts, renderings and information boards. A member of the project design/engineering team will be stationed at each station to provide explanations and answer questions.
A continuous-loop video will talk about why the bridge needs to be replaced, a general outline of the project’s major construction elements, and an explanation of how the work will be staged to mitigate commuter travel impacts.
The open house displays will show, among other things, the proposed layout of a redesigned Route 29/I-95 interchange in New Jersey, and examples of selected treatment options for the residential-facing sides of the project’s noise-abatement wall installations.
The event will be the first in a series of outreach activities the commission plans to conduct to reacquaint the public with the regional project.
The project has been in final design since March. Project preparations have stepped up in recent months with aerial mapping, land surveying, utility line identification and the collection of ground core samples along the project’s affected I-95 highway corridor in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
The Scudder Falls bridge replacement project involves a heavily commuted 4.4-mile portion of the I-95 corridor extending from the Route 332/Yardley-Newtown Road exit in Bucks County, Pa., and the Bear Tavern Road/Route 579 exit in Mercer County. The congestion-prone highway segment is a choke point for job-commuter traffic between Bucks County and central Jersey.
The nearly 55-year-old bridge and nearby interchanges are classified as functionally obsolete.
The commission plans to:
• Replace the existing four-lane Scudder Falls Bridge with a twin-span structure carrying six lanes of through traffic (three in each direction), and three auxiliary lanes (two northbound, one southbound) for traffic merging on and off the bridge.
• Overhaul the accident-prone Route 29/175 interchange on the New Jersey side.
• Reconfigure the Taylorsville Road interchange in Lower Makefield, Pa., to improve the safety and efficiency of the interchange.
• Make drainage upgrades and other improvements along the approach highway between the Route 29/175 interchange and Bear Tavern Road in New Jersey.
• Provide a bicycle/pedestrian walkway alongside the main river bridge connecting the recreational canal paths on both sides of the river.
• Construct full inside and outside shoulders on both replacement bridge spans, a current highway standard requirement. (The bridge’s inside shoulders will be sized to allow for future bus rapid transit service.)
• Install an all-electronic toll gantry and related infrastructure in the southbound direction consisting of high-speed E-Z Pass tag readers and video cameras for license-plate billing.
Full construction activities are expected to get underway in early 2017. The project is expected to take up to four years to complete.