American Parkway Bridge

For decades, riverfront bottlenecks and congestion have been standard at peak traffic times in Allentown. The largest city in the Lehigh Valley is bisected by the Lehigh River with only two bridges connecting the east and west sides at Tilghman and Hamilton Streets. 

Design is underway for the American Parkway Bridge, which will extend the American Parkway from its current terminus near Front Street on the western side of the Lehigh River to a new interchange with Airport Road. Budgeted at about seventy-five million dollars, the project is owned by the City of Allentown; design is being performed with PennDOT standards and review. 

BIA conducted the surveys for the design of the alignment of the bridge, streets and intersections, coordinated a hydrographic survey to develop profiles of the river bottom, and used GPS to establish points for riverbed borings to determine the geological conditions.

BIA is also responsible for the design of a new local roadway corridor approximately three-quarters of a mile in length, New England Avenue, which will utilize former railroad right-of-way that was purchased by the City of Allentown in the mid-1980s. The project, which was bid in the fall of 2009 and began construction in the summer of 2010,  involves the design and permitting of three traffic signals as well as the deactivation of one existing signal.