A wooden bridge over railroad tracks closed for safety reasons nearly a year ago in North Little Rock will be removed and the crossing permanently shut down by Union Pacific Railroad, according to proposed legislation that will be presented to the City Council on Monday.
The humpback bridge was a vehicular and pedestrian crossing over railroad tracks at 14th Street, two blocks west of Main Street and thought to date to the 1940s, but it doesn't have any historical significance, according to city records.
The ordinance for the council's consideration is to agree to abandon and permanently vacate the portion of the 14th Street crossing within the Union Pacific right of way. The railroad agrees to pay the city $75,000 when the street-railroad crossing is removed, access to the railroad right of way is permanently barricaded and the bridge structure removed, according to the legislation.
There are no immediate plans to replace the crossing, city spokesman Nathan Hamilton said.
Any new bridge, even in another location nearby, would also need to involve Pulaski County and the Arkansas Department of Transportation, he said, and would need to be "built to modern standards."
"You'd have to have a suitable, safe at-grade crossing," Hamilton said. "That takes right of way. At this point, there is no schedule, no timeline set [for replacement]."
Mayor Joe Smith had the bridge blocked off last March because it was "structurally unsafe," according to a letter the mayor sent to the City Council the next month. The closure wasn't announced publicly ahead of time and left residents living on the west side of the bridge without straight access to and from their homes.
Detoured to 13th Street a block away, where there is a street-level crossing for the same railroad tracks, motorists at times experienced long delays when trains would stop to wait to pull into the Main Street rail yard. Such waits could last up to 40 minutes, resident Janet Broadaway said last year, or motorists could drive up to 13 blocks around to Pershing Boulevard to get home.
City officials are aware of any train crossing delays because the city's Public Works compound is on the west side of the tracks, Hamilton said. City sanitation, emergency services, traffic services and its vehicle maintenance garage are all in the area of 13th and Sycamore, which were easily accessible from 14th Street as well as 13th.
"City vehicles that go through there account for a lot of the traffic," Hamilton said.
Delay times have been reduced, Hamilton said Wednesday, after Smith has worked with Union Pacific in the past year to minimize the frequency and length of time that trains blocked the 13th Street crossing.
"We certainly want them to recognize the imposition those delays caused," Hamilton said. "The mayor has remarked on a number of occasions that he has noticed a decrease in the delays when he's gone to the Public Works compound."
Neither the North Little Rock police or fire departments nor the Metropolitan Emergency Medical Services ambulance service reported that the loss of the 14th Street bridge caused any hindrance to their response times. Firetrucks couldn't cross the wooden bridge anyway because their weight exceeded the bridge's limit, Danny Bradley, the mayor's chief of staff, said last year.
Metro on 02/21/2019