We know one thing that you won’t be getting for Christmas if you live in Bend. That’s the Reed Market bridge over the railroad.

A reader asked us this week what was going on with the bridge. Not the first time we have heard that question. Not the first time you have probably wondered about it, too.

Think 2026. That’s likely the earliest that construction will start.

Why 2026?

Voters passed the bond in 2020. It was one of the big-ticket items in the bond. The Reed Market corridor work was budgeted at more than $40 million. If you have ever had a rueful look creep across your face stuck in traffic waiting for the train on Reed Market, it may have been a big reason you voted for the bond.

Ryan Oster, the head of Bend’s engineering and infrastructure department, explained what’s going on.

Building a bridge on Reed Market will mean detours. Much of Reed Market will be shut down. There’s no other way to do it.

The marked detour will likely be Wilson Avenue. Remember what Wilson Avenue looked like before the recent improvements? It was too ordinary to prevent extraordinary traffic jams with all those cars being routed over from Reed Market. So the city’s plan was to wait until improvements on Wilson were done.

Yes, the city could have begun with the bridge on Reed Market first. Setting up Wilson for detours was one reason to wait.

Another reason: money. The city has already got some money from the federal government, $1.05 million, to help with planning for the Reed Market bridge, tied to a federal initiative to improve rail crossings. And the city plans to apply for much more. It might in the end get a total of $20 million or $30 million more.

There was money in the bond to do the work, but if the city could get the federal government to chip in $20 million or more, isn’t that just smart?

We’d say yes.

The additional money would also mean more certainty that all the work that was promised in the bond will get done despite rising costs with inflation.

The city is already going to begin planning the bridge design. Sometime next year it will apply for the big pot of federal money for bridge construction. The city also may have to negotiate with some property owners for right of way along Reed Market. There will need to be careful planning so businesses on Reed Market will not lose access for customers and employees during construction.

So 2026, maybe even 2027, is when construction will start on the bridge.

Oster knows that for many people that won’t be soon enough. “I hear it all the time,” he said. But there are reasonable reasons we will be waiting.