With the Craig Memorial Bridge still closed awaiting repairs to damaged safety gates as well as electrical work, work on a city of Toledo project at the neighboring Martin Luther King, Jr. Bridge officially began Wednesday and is slated to run for several months.
While no lanes were closed on the King on the project’s first day, construction barrels were lined up on its downstream sidewalk all the way across the Maumee River. It is on that side that the Toledo Department of Transportation plans to create a dedicated and protected lane for pedestrians and bicyclists while shifting the current westbound lanes toward the bridge’s center.
A city notice said the project’s initial two-month phase would involve lane closings across the bridge during “construction of [a] multi-use path and additional bridge improvements,” and that additional traffic advisories will be issued as work progresses.
Information about the project’s total cost was not available Wednesday, but a Federal Highway Administration grant announced June 14 provided $500,000 in federal money, with a $125,000 nonfederal match, to do work including establishing a barrier between traffic lanes, milling and repaving the bridge’s approach spans, and adjusting its drawspans’ balance.
The project’s scope also includes structural modifications, replacement of electrical drives, and relocation of safety gates.
The multiuse path will provide bicyclists, in particular, with a dedicated travel lane across the Maumee River as well as a visual link between Metroparks Toledo’s Glass City River Walk projects on either side of the river.
“It’s part of our cooperation with the city to redevelop our waterfront,” Scott Carpenter, the Metroparks’ spokesman, said Wednesday.
Metroparks Toledo contractors continue work on the waterfront pathways and related structures on both banks of the Maumee near the King bridge. Those projects are scheduled for opening in early 2026, he said, and the Metroparks district last month received a fresh $19.1 million federal grant to extend the pathway on the downtown side past the historic Vistula neighborhood downstream from the King bridge.
The King bridge modifications will keep two lanes of traffic in each direction, but the westbound lanes — East Toledo toward downtown — will be shifted to occupy space now marked as a long, eastbound left-turn lane in the center that has been unneeded since the Toledo Sports Arena was closed in favor of the Huntington Center downtown.
The city also has a $4.2 million project pending for a dynamic lighting system on the King bridge to complement lights activated nearly five years ago on the Anthony Wayne Bridge farther upstream.
The Craig Memorial Bridge, meanwhile, has now been closed to vehicles for more than a week after a motorist drove through its lowered safety gates while it was closed to traffic July 9 for electrical repairs.
Kelsie Hoagland, an Ohio Department of Transportation spokesman, said Wednesday that a custom fabricated replacement part for one of the damaged safety gates was likely to be delivered by Friday. A contractor was then expected to work during the weekend to install that part and repair other damage to the safety gates’ mechanisms before returning to the previously planned electrical repair, she said.
The driver who broke the Craig’s safety gates was not known Wednesday to have been identified, much less apprehended.
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