TSK Puts the Half-Built Bridge at Libeň Back Out to Tender, for up to CZK 237 Million

The roads authority TSK has advertised a new competition to finish the part-built U Loděnice bridge near Palmovka, one structure in the group of bridges known as the Libeňské soumostí. The base scope is put at 197 million crowns. The tender documents add 40 million as conditional sums for additional work whose extent nobody can yet establish, which takes the total estimated value to 237 million crowns excluding VAT. Zdopravy.cz reported the advertisement.

The structure, designated SO205, replaces the original inundation bridge X-656 and two bridges beside it. Work on it began under the earlier stage of the project and a part-built structure is standing on the site. Whoever wins will take that over and do the rest: finish the deck and its drainage, carry out the associated utility relocations, build the roads and pavements, and prepare for the tram track and its connection to the other parts of the soumostí.

Why the first contract stopped

The Brno regional court confirmed in May this year a decision of the competition office, ÚOHS, which barred TSK from continuing to perform the reconstruction contract. That left the authority holding an unfinished bridge and no lawful way to go on paying the builder of it.

TSK considered finishing the bridge in a provisional form, so that trams could return to the route as quickly as possible. It has chosen instead to run the competition again from the beginning. The reasoning, as Filip Hájek, the director of TSK, puts it, is that one unfinished structure can be competed on its own without waiting for the design work on everything else:

After the earlier course of events we divided the project into clearly defined steps that can be carried out separately. At SO205 we have a part-built structure and we can tender and carry out its completion without waiting for the design preparation of the whole soumostí to be finished. At the same time the preparation of the other parts is running in parallel. The aim is to remove needless delays between the individual stages and gradually get the whole project back into a standard investment regime.

— Filip Hájek, director of TSK

Trams first, main bridge later

What the city wants out of this is a tram, not a bridge. Jaromír Beránek, the deputy mayor for transport, set the order of operations out plainly: restore the tram link between Libeň and Holešovice as soon as possible, let it run temporarily before the repair of the main bridge over the Vltava begins, and coordinate the sequence closely with DPP. Finishing SO205, he said, is the first concrete step that makes that possible.

It is worth being clear about what that means for the main crossing. The tram return is explicitly a temporary state that precedes the repair of the Vltava bridge, not a substitute for it. The soumostí remains a project in pieces, with the largest piece still ahead of it.

Two more tenders before the rest can start

Hájek said TSK is continuing to obtain permits for the other parts of the project and is preparing a separate competition for a designer, who will complete the missing parts of the project documentation, secure the necessary permissions, and prepare the basis for selecting a contractor for the remaining structures. A further tender is being prepared for the construction manager of the whole reconstruction.

That is the measure of where this stands. The news is a 237-million-crown contract to finish one bridge whose concrete is already poured, while the documentation for the rest of the soumostí does not yet exist in a complete form and the designer who is to produce it has not been chosen. Taken together, the three procurements are the city rebuilding the administrative scaffolding of a project that a competition office decision took down — and the thing that will be visible to anyone on the Libeň side is one tram coming back over an inundation bridge.