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This story was written by Itzel Luna, a student in the Stanford Journalism Program. Luna produced this story for a news reporting class.
Construction on a pedestrian bridge to link the east and west sides of East Palo Alto has been delayed, pushing the opening date until at least April 2025, despite original plans indicating the project would be completed late this year.
Workers broke ground on the bridge in October 2023 and work has been delayed primarily due to construction and design issues as well as expected rain in the coming months, project managers said. Decades of activism laid the foundation for the project, which community members said will provide safe pedestrian passage and help connect a city that has long been physically split by U.S. Highway 101.
“We always have to keep an eye out because once you open up construction activity, there may be some unexpected occurrences,” said Anwar Mirza, the city engineer and manager of the project.
The bridge is about 80% completed, said Sergio Torres, a labor foreman for MCM Construction, the project’s general contractor. In the coming months, the project’s crew will lay out the deck of the bridge, build out the pavement and reconstruct the northbound U.S. Highway 101 off-ramp.
The new overpass will be available exclusively to pedestrians and bicyclists to get to and from Woodland Avenue to the west and Donohoe Street to the east. Currently, residents can reach the other side of the city by walking across a narrow sidewalk on the side of the University Avenue overpass — a heavily congested area with constant vehicle traffic.
To get from the city’s west side toward Palo Alto and back, residents must cross the northbound off-ramp of the highway, which contains no traffic signals.
Running parallel to the existing motorist overcrossing on University Avenue, the new bridge will provide a vital connection for the community, said East Palo Alto City Councilmember Ruben Abrica. About 30% of East Palo Alto residents live on the west side — closest to Palo Alto — which is cut off from the rest of the city by the highway.
The construction process has been further complicated by the flurry of other nearby projects, many of which are managed by different cities and counties. Although the projects are not connected, crews sometimes have to do work in the same locations, which can cause delays.
Mirza said resident engineers often work together across projects to coordinate their work. However, that process can be complicated, said Yann Zsutty, a construction inspector for Ghirardelli Associates, the project’s construction management firm.
“In a perfect world, everybody would get together and talk about it,” Zsutty said. “There seems to be a lot of that lacking.”
Bridge construction has also caused cracks in the narrow sidewalk alongside the University Avenue overpass, which Mirza said won’t be addressed until the project is complete.
Motorists can expect lane closures in the coming months, Mirza said. The intersection of Donohoe Street and University Avenue is expected to be closed for 55 straight hours in November so the crew can remodel the freeway off-ramp, which residents said is dangerous for pedestrians.
To get to his job in Foster City, Boyd Martinez, an East Palo Alto resident, bikes through the narrow sidewalk alongside the highway and passes the highway off-ramp every morning. Martinez said many community members make the same journey daily and are anxiously anticipating the bridge opening.
“We have a lot of accidents that go on here. Three months ago, I had a hit-and-run right there on this off-ramp, so this bridge is really something important,” Martinez said.
Abrica said it took the city 10 years to collect the money necessary to complete the bridge’s construction, which has totaled over $15.5 million.
The project is funded by county, state and federal funds.
This is the second of two bridges that the city has built since its founding in 1983. The first bridge, which connects Newell Road and Clarke Avenue further down the highway, was unveiled in 2019 and also took years to fund, Abrica said.
Abrica, who was among the first elected officials in East Palo Alto, said he is “lucky to be alive to see that now we have built two pedestrian buildings because it has made a difference.”
