♪ In northern Kentucky.

Cities along the river are taking part in an initiative to quote, bridge back business.

This comes after the reopening of the Daniel Carter Baird Bridge, which connects Cincinnati and northern Kentucky.

The fire started underneath the bridge back in November and closed the southbound interstate for 100 days.

Kentucky Edition spoke with leaders in the region about their plan to rebuild business.

More about this in tonight's Business Peaks.

>> I'm for 71 is basically a commuter interstate route that connects I-71 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to I-275 in northern Kentucky.

So it fairly short commuter interstate, but it's a significant commuter state interstate route because, again, it serves the communities of downtown Cincinnati through Newport, Bellevue, already Alexander in Kentuckyian it carries about 100,000 member asked every day.

So it has significant amount of trash.

>> And we're like 2 minutes from downtown Cincinnati because it's less than 2 miles to the stadiums and everywhere down there.

And they all come over here for lunch and they are came over here for like, happy hours and different things like that.

And so once the bridge was gone and said it had taken 2 minutes to get about you from downtown.

Now it's taken.

25 to 55 minutes.

>> We got a lot of extra heavy traffic that would have normally come across for 71 or would have gone through Newport and as a result, you had a lot of frustrated drivers that they were not thinking about patronizing the restaurants and bars here, even though they were driving by them very slowly.

Some of the businesses lost as much as a 3rd of their business unit during that three-month period or so.

Well, the bridge was closed.

>> Especially during the holiday season.

We always look for a tear those visitors that are coming in outside of our scope.

And we could we definitely noticed, especially like after Black Friday into December there, there was definitely a decline in traffic from visitors.

>> We were expecting the bridge to take 100 to do.

And so we had that up our whole time schedule on everything for for all the different groups involved because fortunately the bridge opened early, which was a really good thing to stop the bleeding.

If we had 24 hour operations going on at different times, even in extreme cold.

>> Our contractors and they're all of their crews are out there working during.

>> The daytime of the overnight hours, we put together this program for Bellevue, which then went on to expand to the other all 5 cities along the river because they like their program.

Bridging back business.

The first week.

>> I was Bellevue and Dayton.

And then next week is a Covington Newport and for Thomas.

And then the 3rd week, we're actually all coming back together and offering the specials again.

I can tell you in Bellevue, the day we had $10 lunches, we do a ton of people from Cincinnati back over here.

>> It's just that turned out to be a really good thing to do because it was so successful.

I mean, even without some of the challenges over the last several months with the the bridge closing and all the other challenge is running a restaurant and a bar is not for the faint of heart.

>> And so we need to do all we can to help them to be successful.

Ahead, getting as many customers in the door as possible when the bridge was closed.

We didn't really have much of a way that people are busy on the weekends, but like not like.

>> Super busy.

But now since it's been open, we've had.

>> Our way.

It's hour and a half way.

It's a sign of a great be a great way to join in with the different communities and work with the river cities to try to remind people that were here and bring business back to us.