Things seem to be moving forward on much of the proposed Hastings river bridge. The pic below is an artist’s rendering of downtown near the replacement bridge. This shows the ‘arch’ alternative – they still haven’t decided if it will be an arch or ‘cable’ design.

Two additional riverfront projects emerged while planning this bridge: 1) moving the electrical substation that blights the riverfront landscape, and 2) building a pedestrian ‘spiral’ – homage to the long-gone Hastings Spiral Bridge – to connect downtown and the pedestrian walkway on the bridge deck.

Neither of these will be part of the bridge project.

I contacted MNDOT via the Hastings Bridge web page and asked about these projects. Steve Kordosky of MNDOT took the time to write me a detailed reply, the bottom line of which is that none of this is part of the “transportation project.”

Well, actually, some of the electrical stuff will happen. There are two giant power transmission lines that bracket the current bridge, carrying power to the unsightly substation. One is smack in the path of the bridge and has to be moved Xcel Energy. The other is being replaced under some element of the bridge project for improving the aesthetics of the bridge. However, Xcel estimates that it will cost $25M to move the substation, and I guess that’s too expensive for the aesthetics to matter.

Regarding the spiral, it appears that MNDOT at least gave it serious thought and did some preliminary design and analysis. The spiral would in fact be huge: the ‘inside diameter’ of the walkway will be about 100 feet wide, which is as wide as the new bridge itself. And surprisingly, the spiral would not shorten the walk for pedestrians. The spiral would be about as long as walking up to 3rd Street to pick up the new bridge’s sidewalk. Moreover, some folks felt that the 100′ spiral would be too much to add to the riverfront. And MNDOT doesn’t want to spend bridge money on it.

However, MNDOT hasn’t ruled out the spiral entirely. We could add it ourselves using city or county money (fat chance of that, but you never know). In any case, there is work left to be done on the Point Douglas Trail system, and it might make sense to delay the pedestrian spiral until then. So it’s not a ‘now or never’ project.