Potential designs for the city’s nearly $63.4 million Ala Wai Pedestrian Bridge project were posted to the city Department of Transportation Services’ website this week.

Following two city-initiated meetings held in late November, DTS said the results included the community’s pick of the top five designs for a project also known as the Ala Pono bridge.

At the meetings, the city presented 19 design configurations and received several additional design concepts from the public during the meeting.

The city’s resulting report details how each of those 19 bridge design alternatives was rated — namely, via a letter grade, or score from A+ to F, similar to that given in school, the department said.

Nearly 300 people participated in the public meetings — referred to as “workshop/charrettes” by the city — conducted in response to interest from the Waikiki, Moiliili and McCully neighborhoods and to further refine the community’s preferred bridge design, DTS said.

“There were two designs that stood out,” DTS Director Roger Morton told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “There was an attractive low-rise bridge, and the other one was the original design that we had circulated around with the high tower design.”

Both designs “dominated all of the other designs,” he added.

But as far as the city’s preferred design, he said, “We don’t have a favorite design. We have a lot of criteria that will shape the design.”

“Something that’s constructable. Something that won’t impact the banks of the Ala Wai (Canal). Something that will fit in the little, narrow Waikiki side” of the project, Morton said, adding that not much space exists between Ala Wai Boulevard and the canal. “And it makes it — I don’t want to call it a challenge, but it limits the design to things that accommodate the site conditions.”

Originally proposed as a vehicular bridge more than a half-century ago, the project involves construction of a new 300-foot-long pedestrian and bicycle crossing over the 1.3-mile-long Ala Wai Canal, the agency states.

As planned, the proposed mauka-makai Ala Pono bridge will be aligned with University Avenue on the Moiliili side of the Ala Wai Canal and Kalaimoku Street on the Waikiki side, the department says.

DTS has advanced the Ala Wai Pedestrian Bridge project to allow connectivity between the many neighborhoods, businesses, parks, schools and recreational activities mauka of the canal with Waikiki, providing safe, affordable transportation for tourists and locals alike, the agency states.

The bridge, once built, is also expected to attract 25,000 trips per week, the department notes.

DTS, in partnership with the state Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration, leads the project.

In 2019, as part of the environmental review process development, DTS said an alternatives analysis looked at different bridge types and configurations and solicited public input on the preferred alternative. In 2021 the draft environmental assessment was released.

By 2023 the city was awarded a $25 million discretionary grant to offset the estimated $63.38 million cost of the bridge, DTS said.

Additional federal formula-based funds will bring the federal share of the bridge’s cost to 80%. The remaining 20% local match will be provided by city funds.

Funding for the design­-build contract is $55.31 million. That amount does not include initial preliminary engineering and inspection costs, DTS said.

Final design of the bridge will begin only once environmental clearances are secured, the agency states. The current schedule calls for environmental review to be completed later this year.

The design results will be provided to companies interested in submitting proposals on the bridge’s construction. Under the design-­build model, those companies could propose one of the designs presented or develop their own designs. The submitted proposals would be scored in a number of areas by the city’s evaluation team, DTS said.

These areas would include both the “form” and “function” of the proposed bridge as well as capital and maintenance cost and community impacts. The design results would be used to guide the team’s evaluation of the “form” and aesthetics of the bridge, DTS said.

To hire a bridge-building contractor, DTS says the city will release a formal “request for proposals” on the bridge project this summer.

Once a contractor is chosen, possibly later this year, bridge construction is scheduled to start in 2026 and last three years, the agency says.

Meanwhile, not all like the idea of a bridge crossing from Waikiki to University Avenue.

“We don’t need a bridge,” University Avenue resident Laura Ruby told the Star-­Advertiser. “We have well over 600 people who have signed a petition to have no bridge at all.”

“We have asked that a full EIS is undertaken before anything else is ever planned,” she added.

A member of the Ala Wai Mauka Community Association, Ruby said placement of the bridge near her residence would obstruct views and be an eyesore to herself and her neighbors.

“First of all, it is outsized,” she said of the bridge’s proposed design. “That is an affront to people who have to look at something like that.”

In the latest design ranking, she noted the span’s “first” A+ design was deemed “the least offensive,” in that it did not feature high towers as earlier designs depicted.

“If they go with the one that had the most popularity, it’s the low span without any tower,” said Ruby. “But it’s still not the low span that it needs to be; it does not need to be very high.”

And she claimed the area’s open space — the Ala Wai Neighborhood Park and the Ala Wai Community Garden, particularly — will be negatively affected.

“The site is the most important thing. When you talk just in terms of the park, there will be a huge removal of trees,” Ruby said. “Now they’ll be replanted somewhere else, but it leaves a barren desert of concrete where they’re coming in.”

“It will reduce and limit parking access for the community gardeners … for all the people that use the park … and there’s hundreds of people that are there,” she said. “And all of that will be constricted.”

She also objected to the city’s prediction of 25,000 people in a week crossing the bridge.

“If you divide that into seven days, nobody really wants 4,000 people coming across to their neighborhoods each day,” she said. “And these are residential neighborhoods.”

Ruby said the Moiliili side of the planned bridge is historic as well.

“The canal, the promenade and the park are all historical,” she added. “The Ala Wai Community Garden is almost 50 years old, which is a designation for ‘historic.’ And you just can’t be running roughshod over historic neighborhoods.”

Concerned over flood control measures, too, Ruby said the city has not addressed this important aspect for the Ala Wai bridge project.

In response to questions over flooding at the planned bridge site, Morton told the Star-Advertiser that flood control measures “are another requirement for the bridge.”

“We have made it a requirement that the bridge be compatible with future control projects,” he said, adding such projects come under the purview of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Basically, the corps has talked about putting in some type of walled barrier for water for floods.”

He added, “We have consulted with the corps on that project all along.”

But Morton said, “We don’t know what the corps’ project would be. Nobody knows when or if there is going to be a project.”

“If there is a project, we’re confident that the bridge will support most of the designs that have been put forward by the corps,” he said. “But what I’m saying is that the design that we have would incorporate a barrier for the water.”