Pod Krejcárkem Bridge Reopens on the Last Day of the Holidays

The Technical Road Administration (TSK) has finished the reconstruction of the road bridge in Pod Krejcárkem street, the link between Ohrada and Palmovka, timing completion to the last day of the school holidays. Work began in April and traffic was restricted in phases throughout, Zdopravy.cz reported on 31 August.

What was replaced

The list is the standard inventory of a bridge that has reached the end of a service cycle rather than the end of its life: the bridge deck was repaired, the waterproofing replaced, along with the pavement layers, the expansion joints and the bearings. Drainage and safety features were restored. TSK says the work has extended the bridge's life "for many more years".

Bearings and expansion joints are the tell. They are the parts that let a bridge move — thermally, under load — and replacing both at once means the structure was overdue rather than damaged. Renewing the waterproofing and the surfacing in the same season is what stops the process starting again from the top down.

The August shutdown

For most of the job the bridge stayed partly open. In August the scope widened: repairs to the carriageway of Pod Krejcárkem street itself were added, together with alterations to the Ohrada junction and work on the tram track running under the bridge. At that point the bridge was closed completely, with one-way traffic held in a single lane towards the junction of Pod Plynojemem and Novovysočanská.

Bundling the junction, the street surface and the tram track into the window when the bridge was already shut is the sensible way to do it, and it is the reason the closure tightened rather than eased in its final month.

Buses go back

The closure moved bus routes and stops, and those now revert. In the direction of Jižní Město — respectively Točná and Smíchovské nádraží — services had been running as far as the K Žižkovu stop and then continuing through K Žižkovu, Spojovací and Hartigova streets. From the reopening they follow their normal lines again.

The detour is a fair measure of what the bridge does. Pod Krejcárkem carries the direct connection between Ohrada and Palmovka; without it, buses had to be threaded through three named streets on the Žižkov side to reach the same places. Restoring it before the school year starts, rather than a fortnight into September, matters more for the morning peak than the engineering does.