It is very major. There are only 3 roads that cross this (nearly 3 mile) ravine that cuts off a huge portion of the city's population: a local 2-lane neighborhood road, Forbes (this bridge), and the limited access interstate.
It's major for impact. This bridge carries a significant thoroughfare between two of the neighborhoods on the edge of town. It's a primary avenue for several bus routes.
Traffic is going to be an absolute nightmare until they restore it.
I think 30-35k cars a day cross that bridge. Being local to the area, is is going to make traffic in the entire metro area much worse, and it is already awful.
I've been across this bridge probably a hundred or so times since childhood... scary stuff. Our geography is pretty prohibitive to population increase for a larger tax base to support the infrastructure. Lots of plateaus and rivers are the reason for the large number of bridges and tunnels. Even as a local, Pittsburgh is really difficult to get around. The T doesn't go to many places around the city. Buses have the same problems as cars. The inclines stopped being useful. Have fun getting hit by a car while cycling (you'll have the strongest calves to make up for it). The roads are hard to navigate and there isn't enough space for the innovative roundabout. There are some benefits from the geography like culturally distinct neighborhoods but the infrastructure issue really needs addressed. Fortunately, we have our best civil engineers working on the problem [0]
Atlanta commuter here. The bridge collapse has impacted my daily drive. The first half of the trip is much quicker. The second half is much slower. Results in a slightly longer daily commute.
There are certain areas of the city I just won't go to until they fix the bridge. Last night I had to go to Ansley Park and the traffic at Piedmont and Monroe was absurd. Not an area I visit frequently, but there was gridlock, and I suspect most people were there because they had no other route.
285, the perimeter road, is much worse in both directions at all times of day.
I've lived in Atlanta most of my life. I would prefer we spend no more money on roads and instead funnel those resources into public transit.
It is a "major" bridge. I've driven over it more than a thousand times, given that it was on my commute route for several years of my career. Had this collapsed at rush hour, 5pm, two of four lanes would have been filled with cars backed up waiting in traffic.
Philadelphia was just a single span long, albeit two bridges involved, for N/Sbound. I'm not personally familiar with either location, but between Google Maps and the article, this is looking like a full elevated viaduct, and more than a single deck span. On the face of it, looks like a MUCH more complex problem to replace than Philly's.
I have to admit, even though I loved this, something about it made me sad. It feels a bit like the freeway eventually did end up decimating a neighborhood as it was (Bloomfield), to the point it's a historical mystery.
There's a bridge near me that's somewhat similar in that it seems disused a bit, although it connects two residential neighborhoods. It never occurred to me it might be there because of the school right next to it.
Broadly-speaking yes, but none of that would have addressed this collapse. This was a two-lane bridge between two major neighborhoods. People need to get to those neighborhoods and they'd have to divert about a mile north to do it without this bridge.
Pittsburgh is built at the intersection of three rivers and atop the folded spine of the Alleghenies. Any way you slice it that city's gonna have either a lot of bridges or a lot of grumpy people who can't get anywhere.
Everyone focuses on the big bridges, which won’t do well in Portland, but no one thinks about the small bridges across creek crossings in neighborhoods and surface streets. I have to cross 3 creeks before I even get to the highway. I’ll be walking/wading out.
"that doesn’t account for the economic losses that the area felt because they and visitors no longer had access to the interstate"
I've got a pretty awesome picture of me and my son standing in front of that empty section of bridge from the detour route. They essentially routed I-5 traffic into the town and across another bridge. If I had to guess, the stores in that area probably made more money during the detour...
I've driven over it many times, it's clearly a bottle neck. And read my post again, the worst part is they spent hundreds of million on a bridge that will become THE bottleneck if they ever try to improve traffic flow in Sellwood itself.
In Philly, they sacrificed some of the road underneath it and narrowed the traffic lanes over the bridge to enable a very quick, albeit temporary repair. There’s no such option for a span of this length over a river — this is a decade long project that could potentially be sped up to be a years long one.
I live in Magnolia (Briarcliff), and the claim that this is about bridge capacity is nonsense. It's about poor people being in a wealthy neighborhood, nothing less and nothing more.
It would added 200 households, who would live primarily in townhomes and apartments, into an area that has roughly 9,500 households, the majority of whom live in single family residences. This is not going to make a noticeable change to our commutes.
I agree we need to invest in infrastructure for Magnolia, but that problem is orthogonal to this development.
There's a curious one lane bridge[1] over I-40 outside of Raleigh that leads to a gravel road that serves about 4 houses, and then leads into the back side of Umstead State Park. We always joke about it being the "bridge to nowhere" and ponder "who had the political connections to make that happen?"
But I imagine it's something like you were saying: probably when I-40 was built, the land acquisition process resulted in those homes being cut off from everywhere else, unless that bridge was built. And probably it was cheaper / easier / more politically viable to build the bridge than buy out the remaining land-owners.
Or maybe there was more to it. This area is also adjacent to RDU airport: a lot of the land you can see near "Old Reedy Creek Road" on the map, north of I-40, belongs to the airport, even though it is undeveloped (aside from bandit MTB trails). I suppose the argument for the bridge might have involved providing better access to the airport, then or in the future, for emergency crews or something of that nature. The additional access to Umstead Park I wouldn't expect to be a big factor, because the next exit down on I-40 is already one of the two major entrances to the park.
Anyway it's always interesting to look at stuff like this and wonder how/why certain decisions were made.
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