PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — It’s a straight drive through the Philadelphia Navy Yard again, as Broad Street has reopened after 18 months of construction.
Four lanes of Broad Street between Crescent Drive and Intrepid Avenue reopened Monday after a $22 million reconstruction project. Broad Street had been built on top of a wooden bridge constructed in the 1800s that connected League Island to the mainland. By 2006, that timber bridge had weakened to the point that two lanes of Broad Street and the sidewalks near the reserve basin were closed for safety concerns.
“Just in the natural course of things, it had deteriorated over time and that resulted in subsidence and cracking in the sidewalk and the travel lanes,” said Kate McNamara, senior vice president for the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) at the Navy Yard.
“Everybody understood that Broad Street needed to be reconstructed — that it was a super-important safety issue and convenience issue and we had to make sure that it was done right.”
With Broad Street reopened, the Navy Yard will need to tweak the software for the driverless employee shuttle it’s preparing to introduce. “What threw us for a loop is the reopening of Broad Street, which we were able to get done. And that just meant that we had to program the shuttle for that piece of the route,” McNamara said. “We couldn’t do it until the road was actually open, so it added a little bit of extra time to the programming for the shuttle.”
The autonomous shuttle should launch in late January or early February, according to McNamara. In addition to the newly-opened travel lanes, a bicycle lane and pedestrian walkway were also built.
Construction also continues on a mixed-use development project that includes 614 apartments. It would mark the first residential development at the Navy Yard since the base closed in 1996.