Miramichi braces for bridge shutdown, again, with no bypass in the works
Minister says alternate route can’t be built in time to prevent gridlock from Centennial Bridge closure
It's January and that means residents of Miramichi are experiencing a now-annual round of anxious speculation: will the Centennial Bridge close completely this year?
And if it does, will there be any way to avoid the traffic apocalypse that seems certain to follow?
"Every time we get to this time of year, we hear about the bridge closure potentially happening," Coun. Ryan Somers said.
"I heard that last year. And I heard that the year before. I always look at it as 'the dreaded bridge closure,' and we are seemingly relieved when it gets pushed back another year. But the reality is that it needs to be done."
The 1.1-kilometre span across the Miramichi River, completed in 1967, is a key artery not just for the city, but for all traffic moving between northeast New Brunswick and the southern part of the province.
About 13,700 vehicles used it daily in 2023, according the province.
Closing it to upgrade the driving surface — part of an overhaul announced in 2015 that was supposed to be finished last year — will push all that traffic onto city streets.
The King George Highway, where most of it will go, is often congested already.
"All of the local services, fire, ambulance, school bus, mail, anything you can think of will be frozen solid," David Cadogan, a retired newspaper editor, said.
"Not only that, nothing will be able to get through here from the north shore."
Business owner Les Price said the shutdown, expected to start in May and continue until fall in each of the next three years, will undo decades of effort to turn around Miramichi's economic decline.
"If we shut down the traffic, gridlock our traffic, everything we've built over the last 25 years is gone," he said.
"You cannot close that bridge without an alternate route on the north side."
Price and Cadogan are now pushing for a last-minute, ad-hoc, Hail-Mary-pass bid to get that alternate route built — fast.
They're urging the province to hold off again this year on the bridge work and fund a scaled-down version of the northern bypass, a decades-old concept for a road that would reroute provincial traffic around the northern edge of the city.
Price has maps and drawings showing his vision for shorter bypass, which he said could be built in a year to a year and a half, allowing the bridge work to move ahead soon.
But the bypass idea has also been subject to years of political back-and-forth by successive governments, and the new Liberal transportation minister says it can't be built in time to address congestion from the bridge shutdown.
"It is kind of making a bit of a moot point," Chuck Chiasson said in the legislature Nov. 28.
"The Centennial Bridge will be completed before the northern bypass would be."
But timelines are relative in this saga.
The bridge upgrade was first announced by the Gallant Liberals in 2015 with a nine-year timeline, including a full closure in 2020 to upgrade the driving surface.
The original cost was estimated at $83 million but has now more than doubled to $195 million.
The Liberal government cancelled one of the contracts for the work in 2018 without explanation, the first of many setbacks and delays.
The Progressive Conservative government of Blaine Higgs scrapped another of the contracts in 2020 because of spiralling costs.
"It just became an issue that we couldn't afford to move forward on," Bill Oliver, the transportation and infrastructure minister at the time, said during a legislative committee meeting.
Other delays were blamed on supply-chain shortages, while a contractor said overly stringent provincial rules had slowed some of its work.
Meanwhile, support grew in the city for an alternate route.
In his committee appearance in 2020, Oliver made the same arguments against the bypass that Chiasson did last fall.
"Do we actually spend that amount of dollars on something that may not be used to the extent that it could be in the future?" he said.
But last year, months before an election call, the Higgs government postponed the bridge closure yet again, this time by choice — to allow more time "for further planning and preparation to mitigate travel inconveniences to the community."
It also hired a consultant to study the bypass idea.
"It's frustrating to me now, it was frustrating to me then," Somers said. "Election year was when we started to make some traction on this file."
With the Liberals in power, the bridge shutdown is back on for 2025, and the bypass is off again — putting new Miramichi Bay-Neguac Liberal MLA Sam Johnston in an awkward spot.
Last year, as a city councillor, Johnston told Price that he was "darn well determined" to see the bypass done and supported Price's efforts "unconditionally."
But he says now that he accepts Chiasson's view — based on engineering expertise at the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure — that Price's plan isn't realistic.
"I support any plan that has been fully analyzed and studied by the functional specialist experts," he said.
"But I'm not an engineer. Nor are the folks who put forward that plan."
Department spokesperson Jacob MacDonald said based on the consultant's work last year, the province and the city agreed that a bypass couldn't be finished before the bridge. City spokesperson Gail Harding confirmed that.
Price claimed to CBC News that a former transportation minister, who he wouldn't identify, told him the scaled-down bypass could be done in a year and a half "if they all got their ducks in a row."
He also said some road contractors and engineers agree, though he wouldn't name them.
Cadogan said he doesn't care "a damn bit" how long the bypass would take.
"If I say to you, 'We're going to have a nuclear bomb explode over the city,' and you say, 'We don't have time to stop that' — should we not try?"
Johnston told CBC News that the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure confirmed to him that the bridge will shut down this May for the first of three construction seasons, though DTI did not confirm that to CBC News.
"No concrete dates are confirmed at this time as plans are still being finalized for the next phase of the bridge rehab," MacDonald said.
The department has funded road projects to improve traffic flow on the King George Highway when the bridge closes, though Price and his supporters doubt that will be enough.
Johnston says there's still a long-term case for the bypass to address provincial traffic, even after the bridge is finished, and he hopes work will start by the end of his mandate in 2028.
But in the meantime, he says, he's happy the Holt government has "the courage to take the tough decision" to close the bridge this year and get the project done.
"I support the minister unconditionally in moving forward with the repairs to the Centennial Bridge, and the needed closure of the Centennial Bridge to do the repairs at midlife that need to be done, and the ongoing planning of the northern bypass," he said.
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