Anyone who lived through the detour remembers it. For 21 months, from March 2023 to December 2024, the US 1 bridge over the Loxahatchee River in Jupiter was simply gone, and traffic between downtown Jupiter and Tequesta went around by Alternate A1A and Indiantown Road. The replacement is now a prize winner: Engineering News-Record named the Jupiter Federal Bridge Replacement a Best Project in the highway and bridge category of its 2026 Texas and Southeast Best Projects, published October 14.

What replaced the 1958 bridge

The old span went up in 1958 and had been rated structurally deficient. It also had nothing for anyone not in a car: no bike lanes and no real sidewalk, on one of the most walked and biked stretches of US 1 in Palm Beach County.

The new bridge is 915 feet long, with a 267-foot main span that opens as twin double-leaf bascules, the drawbridge design where two pairs of leaves lift from each side and meet in the middle. It carries two 11-foot travel lanes in each direction, 7-foot buffered bike lanes and 8-foot sidewalks set behind concrete barriers, according to the Florida Department of Transportation's project page. The deck is concrete, chosen in part to cut road noise for the neighbors, and there is a new bridge tender house.

The detail boaters and drivers will both notice is height. The bridge now clears up to 42 feet over a 125-foot navigation channel, and FDOT projects about 44 percent fewer openings than before, because more boats can slip underneath without the bridge going up. Fewer openings means fewer of those long waits at the light by the lighthouse on a Saturday afternoon.

The part most people have not found yet

Tucked under the south approach is a three-span observation pier and riverwalk, part of the same project, and the bridge itself has pedestrian overlooks. Given that the bridge sits within feet of the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse, those are some of the better free views in the north county: the red tower on one side, the inlet and the river on the other.

Why it won

ENR's write-up dwells on how hard the site was. The crews worked over an active federal waterway that never closed, alongside a busy tourist corridor and right next to a lighthouse that has stood since 1860. A few of the problems they solved:

The massive bascule pier walls were cast on barges, stood upright and rolled into place on their footings, rather than built in place over weeks. A power cable that had to cross under the channel was supposed to go in by open trench; instead the team drove sheet piles along both sides of the route to contain the work, which kept the water clearer and protected the seagrass and oyster beds around the inlet. And when a late snag with the offshore disposal site killed the plan to sink the old bridge offshore as an artificial reef, the crews cut it apart in place, barged the pieces to the Port of Palm Beach and crushed them for reuse as fill and aggregate.

FDOT District 4 owned the job, Hardesty and Hanover designed it, and Johnson Bros. Corp. built it. ENR's Southeast winners are being recognized at a ceremony in Orlando on October 23.

The numbers behind the detour

The full project ran 4.1 miles of US 1 from County Road A1A to Beach Road, per FDOT, and included intersection improvements at Alternate A1A and Old Dixie Highway and new traffic signal technology. Work started in October 2021, the bridge reopened at the end of 2024 and FDOT lists the project as complete in December 2025. The total came to $122 million.

What it means if you live here

The award is a nice footnote, but the real payoff is already in use. A bike ride from Jupiter to Tequesta no longer means sharing a narrow lane with traffic, the lighthouse views come with a place to stand, and the bridge goes up less often. If you have not walked it yet, park near the lighthouse on a cool morning this fall, find the riverwalk under the south end and take the sidewalk across. It is the best way to see what 21 months bought.