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Bike and pedestrian access from the Brewery District and German Village to Scioto Audubon Metropolitan Park and its waterfront trails will be safer and less difficult after the Columbus City Council on Monday approved the $3. 44 million replacement of the West Whittier Street Bridge.
The two-lane bridge provides the only access via busy CSX and Norfolk Southern railroads to the Scioto Audubon Metropolitan Park and its walking, biking and other recreational facilities. The existing span has a 6-foot-wide sidewalk only across a vehicle sidewalk. and cyclists will have to share the road with vehicles.
The new bridge will feature a 10-foot-wide shared pedestrian and bicycle path and a wall to protect them from vehicular traffic. The replacement span and platforms leading to the bridge will also create a 1,250-foot hole between South Front Street and the front of the Scioto River Trail.
“This is another effort by our component to fill places where we don’t have passage for people,” said Councilmember Lourdes Barroso de Padilla, who chairs the council’s public facilities and shipping committee.
Coincidentally, a new 750-apartment complex on private land adjacent to Scioto Audubon Metro Park is moving forward, and the major entrance and exit to it is planned to also cross that bridge. Council President Pro Tem Rob Dorans, who chairs the council’s Zoning Committee, told The Dispatch after the meeting that the bridge replacement was planned before the apartment complex, but said the project may have been accelerated due to it.
City officials said in 2022 that the planned new bridge would allow for another 1. 5 million car trips a year, or about 4100 trips a day on average, to and from the apartment complex. For this reason, the Columbus and Franklin County metropolitan parks are not agreeing to cede a strip of park land that city officials and developer Zimmer Development, of Wilmington, North Carolina, said was needed for a new frontage connected to the bridge deck.
Dorans said it was his understanding several months ago that developers had replaced his site plan for the new apartment complex to use a narrower strip of land on his property to connect the road serving the new seven-story apartment buildings to the Whittier Bridge.
Separately, on Monday, the council approved the purchase of $398 million in wholesale electric power and other types of electricity from American Municipal Power, Inc. , a nonprofit corporation owned and governed by member utilities, adding the City of Columbus Energy Division. . .
The contract represents an increase of $61. 4 million over last year. The city will resell the electritown to its customers. Electritown’s majority acquisition by 2024 is more than the city will spend on police coverage this year.
wbush@gannett. com
@ReporterBush
This article appeared in The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus City Council approves new W Street Bridge. Whittier of $3. 44 million
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