Safiya Shabazz, a family-care physician at the Penn-Presbyterian Medical Center, expects this fall's work on the South Street Bridge to be a "huge inconvenience."
Nursing graduate student Alexis Udalovas groans that, "It's going to be terrible."
The two are concerned about the Philadelphia Streets Department's plan to reconstruct the bridge starting this fall - a major engineering feat that will close the bridge to all traffic for about two years.
The bridge extends north from 27th Street to Convention Avenue, and crosses the Schuylkill River, four railroads, the Penn Athletic Field and the Schuylkill Expressway.
The South Street Bridge's many users aren't looking forward to the disruption in their daily commutes.
Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush said closing the bridge this fall will inconvenience some Penn workers and affiliates, especially traffic to and from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. But "it's never going to be a good time to reconstruct the South Street Bridge," she said.
University officials are working to make the transition as smooth as possible.
Penn's Division of Public Safety has set up a South Street Bridge Committee to educate members of the Penn community about alternative routes and means of transportation and to ensure that the traffic along detour routes is adequately policed, Rush said.
Although DPS has asked the traffic division of the Philadelphia Police Department to assign extra officers to key detour points, Rush said some Penn police officers may need to "fill in those blanks."
Despite such efforts, those who commute across the bridge are anticipating hassles and delays.
Shabazz drives to work every day and parks in a lot underneath the bridge, an easy five-minute walk from Penn's campus. She doesn't know yet what she'll do when that isn't an option and worries the traffic along the nearby Walnut Street Bridge will be "enormous."
Udalovas said the South Street Bridge is "the only direct route" to University City from her house. She will likely walk across the Walnut Street bridge instead, but that detour will add at least 20 minutes to her morning walk to school, she guessed.
And other Philadelphia residents may suffer even more from the bridge's closure than Penn students and workers.
Aaron Greene, an employee of the Philadelphia Electric and Gas Company, estimated that shutting down the bridge would add about an hour and a half to his daily commute.
The reconstruction period will be a "very challenging" period for everyone involved, Rush said. "It is our hope that a lot of people decide that it's easier to use public transportation."
Although the reconstruction has been in planning since 1995, the city kept putting it off because the project had to be coordinated with so many other entities, according to the Philadelphia Streets Department's Web site.
"Reconstruction has to be done now because of the condition of the bridge," Rush said. "There's a lifespan to all bridges, and this one has reached the end of its own."
For more information about how to plan for the bridge's closing, visit publicsafety.upenn.edu/ssbridge
