16th Street bridge closure meeting INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — A community meeting took place on Indy’s westside over what’s threatening to be more than a traffic nightmare. The planned full closure of the 16th Street bridge could put livelihoods and lives at risk, community advocate Aaron W illiams with the Keep the Bridge Open Coalition said. “And not to mention the countless number of businesses, we’ve calculated over 125 million dollars within a quarter mile of this bridge that generate revenue that are going to be directly impacted,” Williams said. The aging bridge is scheduled for a full replacement this summer. But in order to do it, the city’s department of public works says it will have to be fully closed to traffic in both directions, for two years. The closure recommendation was first mentioned in a scoping report dating back to 2016. “It’s been pretty consistent that the recommendation has been a full closure based off of what that first scoping report said,” Kyle Bloyd with the Indianapolis Department of Public Works told News 8. But residents want to know why the critical span that connects downtown to the city’s Haughville neighborhood can’t be reduced to one lane while the reconstruction takes place, allowing some traffic to get through, instead of none at all. “We’ve seen time and time again, Lafayette Road, West Kessler Boulecard. We’ve seen where a bridge has been open with one lane in each direction,” Williams said. It’s a question the owner of Longs Bakery, a longtime Indianapolis favorite, has.The bakery is walking distance to the bridge, and could see a staggering revenue loss tied to even one day of the bridge being closed, let alone two years. “We really rely on foot traffic and 500 to 1000 customers a day that are impacted by a bridge they can’t get around or a 10th street bottleneck, that’s our biggest concern,” Carl Long, owner of Longs Bakery said. The bridge opened in the late 1940s. The Indiana Department of Public Works says there’s no record of any significant rehab effort on the bridge since that time. ...read more read less