Call Us When You Get to the Bridge

An Update from the Davisville Peninsula

By Dean Lundgren, President, Davisville Civic Association

The Cape Cod Canal Bridges (Bourne and Sagamore, respectively) provide basically everyone who lives on or visits this wonderful peninsula access to the Cape and Davisville, in particular.

Let me briefly give the background for the title of this update. Now that almost everyone who travels has a cell phone with them, when we are expecting visitors to our home, we frequently say to them, “Call us when you get to the bridge.” To remind us of this, we were gifted and now display in our front hall a wooden sign which contains that saying. And it does remind us that many visitors will be coming, especially during the summer months!

Recently, at a press conference in Sandwich, Senator Markey and Congressman Keating indicated that they were confident that the current federal infrastructure bill, as presently written and approved by the Senate, and if ultimately approved by the House, would provide $1.1 billion in funding for the new bridges.

A completed study by the US Army Corps of Engineers has recommended that these two canal bridges both be replaced, as they both now are 86 years old and in need of constant expensive repair. The planned bridges would include two travel lanes and one auxiliary lane designed as acceleration/deceleration lanes (in each direction), as well as a path for bikes and pedestrians.

Obviously much more planning and construction, potentially subject to a myriad of delays, must take place before we have new modern bridges to cross the canal. Hopefully the current major backups during commute hours - and especially Friday evening and Sunday afternoon during tourist season - will be only a distant memory at some future point.

However, we may still want our visitors to: “Call us when you get to the bridge!”