PennDOT plans preservation project, city-side ramp replacement on Highland Park Bridge

A $50 million to $60 million project to preserve the Highland Park Bridge and replace the ramps on the Pittsburgh side of the bridge will create serious traffic problems for about two years beginning in mid-2027.

The bridge itself, which crosses the Allegheny River between Pittsburgh’s Highland Park neighborhood and O’Hara, will remain open with lane restrictions through much of the work, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation officials said during an online overview of the proposed project Wednesday. But the entrance and exit ramps on the Highland Park end will have to be closed one at a time while they are replaced, creating lengthy detours for motorists wanting to go between the Allegheny Valley on Route 28 and Highland Park and Oakland in the city.

The department finished a three-year project last fall on the 2,423-foot seven-span bridge’s interchange with Route 28. That work created two lanes of through traffic with separate exits for the bridge and improved the safety of traffic patterns at the end of the bridge.

For this project, Erik Porter, PennDOT’s project manager, said the department didn’t plan to replace the ramps but found they were so deteriorated it didn’t have a choice. That work will create “some traffic challenges,” he said, because the closest alternate bridges are the Hulton Bridge in Oakmont to the north and 62^nd Street Bridge in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood to the south, neither of which connect directly with Route 28.

One benefit from replacing the ramps, officials said, is that designers can make the curves less sharp. That should reduce the number of crashes where long trucks regularly strike barriers and abutments.

Jason Zang, PennDOT’s district executive, said it is important to improve the bridge now rather than replace it. The downside is that the existing bridge can’t be made wider to improve amenities such as sidewalks and bicycle access, something the public asked several questions about during the meeting.

“If we were to replace a bridge of this magnitude … that probably wouldn’t happen until 20 years from now,” Zang said. “It has a lot of life left in it, and we plan to get some more useful life out of it.”

Planned work on the bridge itself includes repainting it, replacing rocker bearings and expansion joints, repairing and upgrading drainage and the steel and concrete substructure, retrofitting steel members and repairing concrete barriers, and placing a new overlay surface on the deck.

One element that won’t be part of this project is improving the traffic flow between the bridge and Washington Boulevard a few hundred yards away, where traffic backs up inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening with traffic heading to and from Oakland. Porter said improvements there would have to come in another project, but none is scheduled yet.

Since the project is more than two years away, PennDOT officials said, the department plans to repave the ramps this spring because they have a lot of potholes.