Every weekday morning an account called LoganToChelsea tells a few thousand people whether they will make it to work on time. “No expected lifts this morning,” it said Friday. Thursday it posted a string of them: up and closed, down and open, expected opening at such a time. If you drive between Chelsea and East Boston, or ride the 112 bus over it, you already follow it. If you do not, here is what it is tracking and why the bridge goes up at all.
A drawbridge that serves the airport
The Chelsea Street Bridge is a vertical-lift span over Chelsea Creek, connecting Chelsea Street in East Boston with Marginal Street and the Chelsea waterfront. It opened on May 12, 2012, replacing an older, lower drawbridge, at a cost of $125,491,530.96. Raised, it clears 175 feet. It carries more than 26,000 vehicles a day.
It lifts because of what is upstream. The tank farms along Chelsea Creek, Global’s terminal at 11 Broadway, the Chelsea Sandwich terminal, Gulf, Irving on the Revere side, Sunoco across in East Boston, receive petroleum by barge and tanker. Much of the fuel the airport and the region run on comes up that creek by water. Federal regulation gives the boats the right of way: the bridge must open on signal to 139 feet for any vessel, and to the full 175 if the ship asks. The rule was last amended in November 2025. Marine traffic does not wait for the morning rush.
That means as many as ten lifts a day at the busiest times, and the people who drive it say five or more is common. Each lift, from the gates dropping to traffic moving again, costs 20 to 40 minutes. A tanker moving slowly up a narrow creek does not clear quickly.
Who runs it
The bridge is operated for MassDOT by a contractor. In January 2022 the span went up with a vehicle still on it. Nobody was hurt. MassDOT said two operators employed by its contractor, Cora, “did not follow protocol and have subsequently been terminated.” In March 2025 the bridge stuck in the upright position over a weekend and was closed for emergency repairs to damaged fiber optic cables. Both incidents were short. Both were the kind of thing that gets talked about on the bus for weeks.
The notification system exists because East Boston and Chelsea residents demanded it. In 2019 MassDOT admitted at a community meeting that its advance warning was not working and that people were losing half an hour with no notice. The fix was the electronic message boards on the approaches and the LoganToChelsea feed on X, which posts the estimated lift times each day and updates as they happen. The MBTA also pushes bridge delays through T-Alerts for the bus routes that cross it.
How to live with it
Check the feed before you leave. If a lift is posted for your window, the alternatives are the Tobin Bridge and Route 1A around through Revere, both of which add time but not the unpredictable kind. The 112 bus is the route most exposed. If you are heading to Logan, allow for a lift on the way even when none is posted, because ships run late too.
Nothing has been announced for the bridge in 2026: no maintenance closure, no schedule change. The fuel keeps coming up the creek, the bridge keeps going up for it, and a small account with a plain name keeps a lot of people from being late.