This Panther Island bridge to downtown Fort Worth will open to traffic in 2 months
The much anticipated opening of White Settlement Road’s Panther Island bridge could come in the early weeks of 2021.
Contractor Texas Sterling is obligated to have work done by the end of December, but Doug Rademaker, a senior project manager for the city, said Wednesday he expects traffic to open on the bridge in the “very first part of the year.”
Rademaker did not provide a specific date for opening.
Work on the North Main Street bridge should be done in the spring of 2021 and the Henderson Street bridge should be open in the summer, he said. Those bridges were expected to be finished by December 2021.
“We should be bringing them in several months earlier than that,” Rademaker said.
The bridges are needed to connect downtown to the planned Panther Island, an 800-acre island in the Trinity River that would be formed after a bypass channel is cut between the two forks. The $1.17 billion project has languished without federal financial support for years.
The White Settlement Road bridge has been particularly bothersome to businesses along the road west of the river. Unlike the other two roads, an easy detour does not exist for White Settlement Road, so traffic has largely been cut off.
Once scheduled to open in 2017, the bridges were delayed by design issues and the completion date was pushed back two years. At one point in 2019, project officials said the White Settlement bridge would be finished by late summer 2020. The date was pushed back again to the end of this year.
