OAKLAND — Two and a half years late, the replacement of Oakland’s Embarcadero bridge over the Lake Merritt Channel — linking Jack London Square and Brooklyn Basin — finally opened this week.

Because the old bridge was seismically unsafe, the city opted to demolish it in 2015. An 18-foot wider, 6-foot taller bridge was built in its place. The new bridge features a 5-foot sidewalk on one side and a 12-foot sidewalk on the other side, as well as bike lanes on either side of the two-lane road. The bridge is part of the San Francisco Bay Trail — a 500-mile walking and cycling path in the works around the entire San Francisco Bay.

Oakland Department of Transportation director Ryan Russo, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the bridge Friday, touted the new bridge as complementing the housing development at Jack London Square and the 3,100-unit Brooklyn Basin complex — one phase of which will open later this summer.

“The development that’s happening here, both in the Jack London District and over at the Brooklyn Basin, are going to provide desperately needed housing units. That’s how we grow equitably, having this bridge as a connection will serve that growth,” Russo said.

The bridge replacement was supposed to be finished by December 2016, but shortly after the project began, crews discovered contaminated water and soil at the site. On top of that, there was a dispute between the city and the contractors over who was supposed to take care of the permit requirements. Because of both problems, the project didn’t even start until July 2016.

Oakland Department of Transportation engineer Mohamed Alaoui, in an interview, said some of the adjacent parcels along the estuary had been used for industrial purposes, contaminating the soil and water.

“We had to basically treat the water as we were working at the site,” Alaoui said.

The delay drove up the cost of the project. As of November 2018, 65 percent of the original $23.5 million contract had been spent, though construction was only about 40 percent complete, according to a 2018 city Department of Transportation report. When all was said and done, the project’s bill came out to $31.4 million — nearly all of which was paid for by a U.S. Department of Transportation grant administered through Caltrans. A small amount of the total funding came from Alameda County transportation and infrastructure bond Measure B and state transportation bond measure Proposition 1B.

“There are infrastructure projects that hit these challenges that actually don’t make it to this moment,” Russo said. “They end up in lawsuits, or they run out of money or just never happen. And that could have happened; we could have not been here. What that says is that we had a dedicated team in the city and with our consultants and construction to find a way to work together to solve the problem.”