{"id":224017,"date":"2026-04-08T22:28:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T22:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/224017\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T22:28:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T22:28:16","slug":"miamis-downtown-bridge-project-is-delayed-again-why-is-it-taking-so-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/224017\/","title":{"rendered":"Miami\u2019s downtown bridge project is delayed \u2014 again. Why is it taking so long?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"View<\/p>\n

View of the ongoing construction of the arches for the I-395 signature bridge, in front of the Adrienne Arsht Center in downtown Miami, on Thursday, March 26, 2026.<\/p>\n

(Pedro Portal\/pportal@miamiherald.com)<\/p>\n

Reality Check<\/a> is a Herald series holding those in power to account and shining a light on their decisions. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email our journalists at tips@miamiherald.com.<\/a><\/p>\n

The chaos starts as soon as you approach either end of Interstate 395, the critical downtown Miami highway link whose insanely complex, seemingly endless reconstruction has become a mirthless joke for the tens of thousands of drivers who are forced daily to navigate its ever-changing twists and turns.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been like that for seven years. And there\u2019s no end in sight to the hazards and aggravation.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot to put up with. The traffic backed up to the MacArthur Causeway bridge on one end, and high over the Miami River onto State Road 836 on the other. The suspension-rattling pavement. The shifting lanes that turn the highway into a slalom course<\/a>. The constant ramp and road closures. The confused drivers darting across three lanes to an exit that was there last month, but has now vanished.<\/p>\n

On the ground, unsightly heaps of construction materials, dust and noise, closed sidewalks and side streets at the front door to the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the Perez Art Museum Miami and Frost Science Museum.<\/p>\n

There has also been a cost in human lives. So far this year, there have been two serious construction accidents<\/a>, including one last month in which a worker fell to his death<\/a> on Biscayne Boulevard.<\/p>\n

And, astride it all, a set of gigantic concrete bridge arches, reminiscent of a certain fast-food franchise, have been so slow coming off the grill as to markedly augment the Florida Department of Transportation\u2019s reputation for failing to finish any road project on time.<\/p>\n

This one\u2019s breaking records. And according to the lawsuits flying between project contractors, engineers and their insurers, those now-infamous arches and the \u201csignature bridge\u201d they\u2019re meant to support may be one big reason why.<\/p>\n

Documents filed in those cases outline initial errors in the design of the six arches that, according to the project\u2019s lead contractor, led to 18 months of delay and required a redesign that added significant time, cost and complexity to their construction, pushing back the expected completion date at least five years.<\/p>\n

FDOT declined to make someone available for an interview with the Miami Herald and did not respond to written questions about the project \u2014 the agency\u2019s consistent practice for years as the unexplained delays mounted.<\/p>\n

Absent FDOT transparency, here\u2019s a chronology of postponements, partial explanations provided in brief agency statements, and claims from an extensive court record of lawsuits and counter-suits that help explain some \u2014 but not nearly all \u2014 of the reasons the project has been delayed so long.<\/p>\n

The first anticipated completion date for the new Miami bridge? 2021\"A<\/p>\n

A rendering depicts a reconstructed Interstate 395 overpass and its \u201csignature bridge\u201d arches in downtown Miami, with the Arsht Center to its left.<\/p>\n

(Archer Western-The De Moya Group)<\/p>\n

It certainly wasn\u2019t supposed to be like this.<\/p>\n

When FDOT first picked a contractor in 2017 for the road-engineering quagmire officially known as the I-395\/SR 836\/I-95 Design-Build Project, the whole thing was supposed to be done in four years \u2014 by 2021.<\/p>\n

Yes, that\u2019s five years ago.<\/p>\n

Now, in the latest update from FDOT, the delivery date has been postponed again, to late 2029. If you\u2019re keeping score at home, that\u2019s eight years behind the original schedule.<\/p>\n

Yet FDOT made that latest delay public in the least noticeable way. It simply changed the expected completion date on the project webpage<\/a> with no statement, no explanation and no acknowledgement of the newest postponement.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the posted project cost has crept up \u2014 from $802 million originally to $866 million now.<\/p>\n

An FDOT spokeswoman, Maria Rosa Higgins Fallon, asked for written questions from the Herald. After more than a week, she had not responded and did not respond to or acknowledge follow-up messages. The same thing happened with the Greater Miami Expressway Authority, or GMX, the agency that manages Miami-Dade\u2019s toll highways and a partner in the project.<\/p>\n

In the past, FDOT has blamed delays on bad weather and supply-chain issues prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic in broad statements that provide no details or acknowledgement of construction issues. In 2023, an agency spokeswoman even ascribed the blame<\/a> in part to holidays.<\/p>\n

But the agency has never fully detailed reasons for delays, even as the completion date was pushed back at least three times since 2021.<\/p>\n

By 2021, the first targeted completion date, FDOT had already announced the project finish would be delayed to 2024.<\/p>\n

Criticisms of the Miami signature bridge project\"The<\/p>\n

The arches for the Interstate 395 \u201csignature bridge\u201d over Biscayne Boulevard rise between the Arsht Center, to the right, and the Frost Science Museum, bottom left.<\/p>\n

(Pedro Portal\/pportal@miamiherald.com)<\/p>\n

To critics who have complained from the start that the project was a waste of taxpayer money better spent on expanding public transit, the inflated costs and delays are all too predictable. Cathy Dos Santos, executive director of the Miami advocacy group Transit Alliance, called the project \u201cmisconceived from the start.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the consequence, she said, of focusing public resources almost exclusively on cars instead of mass transit that can more efficiently carry far more people, and an overly complicated plan that calls for double-decking State Road 836 over the Miami River.<\/p>\n

\u201cHighway widening is already extraordinarily costly and FDOT\u2019s choice to double-deck the project only ballooned the price tag and stacked on delays,\u201d Dos Santos said in an email. \u201cAlternatives have existed since the 1980s, when Metrorail was first proposed: a mass rapid transit connection to Miami Beach. For decades now, there have been projects proposed, straw polls, resident polling all pointing to the same conclusion: transit moves more people than cars.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnless we want highways stacked as tall as the downtown skyline, our state transportation agency has to start building transit too.\u201d<\/p>\n

The massive road project, decades in planning, has been enveloped in controversy even before getting underway.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, FDOT concluded that I-395, the mile-long elevated highway built in the late 1960s to connect the new Interstate 95 and the MacArthur Causeway, was hazardous and structurally and functionally obsolete. Its solution: tear down the old expressway and replace it.<\/p>\n

In collaboration with the agency in charge of Miami-Dade County\u2019s toll highways, then known as MDX, FDOT opted to package the I-395 reconstruction with a far-reaching overhaul of the dysfunctional, often-clogged interchange where the highway meets I-95 and State Road 836, also known as the Dolphin Expressway, into one mega-project.<\/p>\n

But when FDOT first announced it was ready to move on the project, then-Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, other public officials and residents balked. They cited the decimation its construction wrought on the historically Black neighborhood of Overtown and areas around Biscayne Boulevard, arguing that building something similar again would perpetuate the damage done to the city.<\/p>\n

Diaz and former Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez, soon to be elected to the Miami-Dade County Commission, along with other officials and urban activists, pressed FDOT to consider other options, including replacing I-395 with a surface boulevard, or burying it underground or in an \u201copen-cut\u201d below street level, arguing that an elevated expressway had no place in a resuscitating downtown Miami and the planned new cultural institutions flanking it.<\/p>\n

FDOT did not budge \u2014 citing cost and engineering complexity as objections to the proposed alternatives \u2014 but agreed to super-elevate the highway and significantly reduce its support columns and support embankments<\/a> to lessen its impact at street level, while providing the land beneath it for the creation of a new 33-acre park that would join sundered pieces of the urban fabric back together. (The Trump administration last year rescinded a $60 million federal grant from a Biden administration program<\/a> to fund the park.)<\/p>\n

The agency also agreed to make the elevated, 1,000-foot segment over Biscayne Boulevard and Northeast Second Avenue into an architecturally distinctive \u201csignature bridge\u201d that could become a symbol of new Miami. When the agency seemed to backtrack<\/a>, later proposing a purely functional bridge with no design flourishes as an option, city officials sued.<\/p>\n

They got what they wanted.<\/p>\n

FDOT baked in a requirement for an iconic arched bridge design into its request for bids for a contractor who would be responsible for designing and building the bridge, the new highway and improvements to the I-95 spaghetti bowl, traversed daily by 450,000 vehicles.<\/p>\n

Complex bridge design added complications\"The<\/p>\n

The arches for the Interstate 395 \u201csignature bridge\u201d over Biscayne Boulevard rise in front of Arsht Center, at right, in downtown Miami.<\/p>\n

(Pedro Portal\/pportal@miamiherald.com)<\/p>\n

Initially, the funding included nearly $616 million in federal and state highway money. MDX, which has been replaced by the newer GMX, contributed an additional $186 million from toll revenue for improvements to State Road 836.<\/p>\n

Under the design-build approach, the winning bidder \u2014 in this case, a joint venture between contractors Archer Western, whose parent company is in Chicago, and Miami\u2019s The de Moya Group \u2014 must deliver the project at the budgeted cost. It\u2019s designed to save taxpayers money and put the onus for on-time completion on the contractor, who would absorb the cost of any budget overruns or delays.<\/p>\n

The Archer Western bid proposed an even more ambitious blueprint than FDOT requested, in the form of a new double-deck bridge over SR-836. It would send drivers hurtling directly to and from the MacArthur, avoiding the interchange altogether and helping reduce congestion below on I-95, where new ramps and an added lane would improve traffic flow.<\/p>\n

The team also submitted a design for a dramatic and ambitious bridge to be suspended by cables from six soaring arches, described by the contractor as a fountain, and anchored to the ground by a massive center pier. The design immediately drew ridicule from some critics who likened the arches to a giant tarantula attacking downtown Miami, or the arches on a McDonald\u2019s outlet.<\/p>\n

The second-place bidder, a consortium of MCM Construction of Miami and Figg Bridge Engineers of Tampa, separated from the winner by just a few points in the FDOT scoring system, proposed a significantly simpler design consisting of a bridge suspended from a pair of tall piers, shaped somewhat like ballet dancers. But the MCM plan was dinged in the evaluation for design elements of its piers that were purely decorative.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The second-place bidder for FDOT\u2019s Interstate 395 reconstruction project would have featured a simpler design for the \u201csignature bridge\u201d over Biscayne Boulevard, featuring pylons that recall dancers, than the winning proposal for a bridge with six soaring concrete arches by the Archer Western de Moya Group team.<\/p>\n

(Miami)<\/p>\n

FDOT\u2019s selection, in 2017, triggered a year-long bid challenge and a political tussle between the Archer Western team and the MCM group that hinged in significant measure on which competitor would deliver the most aesthetically pleasing designs for the highway and signature bridge.<\/p>\n

MCM alleged FDOT\u2019s scoring and evaluation system was rigged to favor Archer Western and argued the SR-836 double-decking was unnecessary and would add complexity and cost to the project, among other arguments. MCM also challenged Archer Western\u2019s claim that put total construction time at just three years, calling it unrealistic, in contrast to its own given timeline of four years.<\/p>\n

The battle ended only because MCM and Figg withdrew their challenge in 2018, after tragedy struck in another project they had teamed up on, a pedestrian bridge over the Tamiami Trail for Florida International University that collapsed while under construction, killing six people and injuring 10 others.<\/p>\n

The Archer Western group finally signed an $802 million contract with FDOT in July of 2018. The initial three-year completion window, set to wrap in July 2021, was soon extended to four years.<\/p>\n

By then, the Archer Western group was already running into its own problems on the I-395 project \u2014 also connected to bridge design.<\/p>\n

Those are detailed in lawsuits filed in 2022 by the Archer Western venture in Miami-Dade and South Florida\u2019s federal courts against its engineering partner, Nebraska-based HDR, and the project\u2019s insurers.<\/p>\n

According to Archer Western, HDR\u2019s design engineers failed to properly account for wind loads \u2014 including hurricane winds \u2014 in an initial, partial design for the signature bridge arches that the contractor used to calculate construction costs and time for its bid.<\/p>\n

The error was not discovered until four months after the bid was awarded, the lawsuits say, when HDR hired a wind consultant to look over its design. Archer claimed HDR also failed to design a required vibration-damping system and a lighting warning system for aircraft flying overhead.<\/p>\n

It then took until mid-2019 for FDOT to approve a redesign, the Archer Western complaints say.<\/p>\n

HDR\u2019s error, Archer Western claimed, caused costs to soar. In its initial federal suit in 2022, the Archer Western team claimed $150 million in compensatory damages and said the engineer\u2019s \u201cnegligence\u201d set completion of the project back until at least 2025.<\/p>\n

HDR filed a counter-claim against Archer but did not contest the claim that its initial design did not fully take wind loads into account. The firm, however, said it was never meant to be a full or completed construction blueprint.<\/p>\n

A judge partly dismissed Archer Western\u2019s claim, saying the contractor could not show \u201cgross\u201d negligence by the engineers and ruling that HDR\u2019s liability was limited by the venture\u2019s contracts and insurance policies to $10 million.<\/p>\n

The two companies settled in 2024, but Archer Western then sued the project\u2019s insurers in state court, repeating its claims about HDR\u2019s design errors and noting that all other bid competitors had completed wind analysis in their proposals to FDOT.<\/p>\n

This time, the Archer Western team claimed increased costs of $400 million due to the engineering miscalculations. Its court pleadings also noted that to settle the federal case, HDR paid Archer Western $12 million, while the joint-venture team had to pay even more to the engineering firm — $30 million for additional services rendered.<\/p>\n

Court records show the state lawsuit against the insurers was dismissed, though it\u2019s unclear from the court docket whether any settlement was reached.<\/p>\n

Separate litigation, as reported by Miami\u2019s NBC 6 in February, detailed yet another cause<\/a> for significant delay: In 2020, a plant on the construction site produced defective concrete that was used for three months before anyone noticed. That meant project sections where the spoiled concrete was used, including road segments and support pieces, had to be torn out and redone, adding months of further delay and costing the venture $3.6 million, the station reported.<\/p>\n

By 2023, FDOT said the project cost had risen to $840 million, but it\u2019s unclear what accounted for the increase or whether the agency authorized any additional payments to the Archer Western team.<\/p>\n

The agency has since then said little as the project was further delayed and the listed cost rose. Requests from the Herald and other news organizations for explanations have been met with general responses that don\u2019t address specific questions, often after weeks of delay in answering.<\/p>\n

If Archer Western\u2019s allegations in court are correct, the arch design miscalculations set back completion to 2025.<\/p>\n

But FDOT has issued no explanation as to why it\u2019s now saying the project won\u2019t be done until 2029.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"View of the ongoing construction of the arches for the I-395 signature bridge, in front of the Adrienne…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224018,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[47270,87911,4288,2345,123,125,124,33914,101324,93380],"class_list":{"0":"post-224017","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-miami","8":"tag-archer-western","9":"tag-completion-date","10":"tag-downtown-miami","11":"tag-fdot","12":"tag-miami","13":"tag-miami-headlines","14":"tag-miami-news","15":"tag-miami-river","16":"tag-signature-bridge","17":"tag-state-road-836"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}