Workers have finished the eighth of eleven contracts in a rehab program that's been running on the George Washington Bridge for thirteen years, with a price tag north of $2 billion when it's done.
That's not a typo. This job started before some apprentices on it were out of high school. The Port Authority split the full rehabilitation into eleven separate construction contracts rather than one mega-job, and that structure is itself the lesson for anyone bidding public infrastructure work in this region: a bridge this size doesn't get fixed in one mobilization, it gets fixed in a procession of them, each one its own bid, its own schedule, its own crew.
The work covers suspension cables, deck sections, anchorages, and approach structures — the kind of scope that requires closing lanes at 2 a.m. and reopening them before the morning commute, over and over, for over a decade. Three contracts remain. If you're a heavy-civil contractor who hasn't chased Port Authority bridge work before, this is the playbook: these packages come up for years at a stretch, and the agency has a track record of staging them so no single contractor has to carry the whole job alone.
The Port Authority hasn't said when the remaining three contracts go out to bid, but the cadence so far — one contract completing roughly every year and a half across this program — gives bidders a rough clock to watch. For a sub or GC with bridge experience, that's a pipeline, not a one-off.
First reported by Construction Dive.