indyfabz

As someone who works in an industry that is heavily involved with bridges, I can tell you they are expensive. Even pre-fabed ones. The work gets even more expensive if it's over an active highway or large waterway. And while it's hard to tell from the article, that price tag may include the sidewalks mentioned.

indyfabz

Exactly! The new Goelthels Bridge connecting New Jersey with Staten Island was estimated to cost $1.5 BILLION dollars. (Don't know what the final price tag was.) The bridge is 7,109' long. $211,000/foot. And some of that was for a bike/ped path.

no motor?

They put a bridge over 6 lanes of roadway here about a year ago and I think it cost ~$1,000,000. Plus the life of the bicyclist that died crossing the street there before the bridge got built.

Hiro11

Tyson's Corner to Vienna, 90 foot bridge, fully paved, lighted etc... I'm not particularly surprised.

Side note: has anyone noticed that the richest counties in the country are those around DC?
https://www.usnews.com/news/healthie...ies-in-america
It's great to know that our selfless government officials are focused on looking out for us huddled masses and not focused on feathering their own nest or those of their cronies... Line up everyone, the trough is full!

Back to the topic at hand: my main local MUP (Illinois Prairie Path - Founded in 1963) recently contracted a new ~2-3 mile stretch of crushed limestone through a flat, vacant forest preserve. No lighting, no pavement, no bridges required. Estimated cost: $3.1MM. Building properly engineered stuff isn't cheap.

Also, to the person above comparing US infrastructure building costs to those costs in Japan, another factor is the unique strength of right-of-way and property rights laws in the US. The US in general grants landowners extraordinary power over the property they own. I'm not sure how Japan compares, but these laws make getting most anything done very difficult in the US. See also: the price of constructing new rail lines in the US.

indyfabz

Wow! Hunterdon County, NJ has dropped to 7th. IIRC, for years it was No. 3 or 4. The creation of I-78 paved the way for North Jersey/NYC money.

Despite the development that has taken place in certain parts, there is still some great riding up there. A few years go I saw this little fellow by the side of the road during a descent before he fled.

Hiro11

Cougar are sometimes spotted in my (very suburban/developed) Chicagoland town. Several have been spotted in urban Chicago in recent years. I used to live in Colorado and when I first moved out there I was surprised to learn that cougars were actually very common. They are masters of camouflage and notoriously difficult to see in the wild so just by seeing one, you know there are many out there. Cougars are also very adaptable and can thrive pretty much anywhere, they'll happily live in a swamp, on a mountain or in a neighborhood.

Bill in VA

The area where this MUP was built is about 5 miles from me. It is some of the highest valued land in Fairfax County and to cross Route 7 is a true nightmare on foot, and even more hazardous on a bike, hence the overpass. This has been a major traffic bottle neck for decades. It has been getting a major makeover due to the extension of the Metro Silver Line. It is the area with 2 major high end Malls, lots of government contractors and high tech. Fairfax and Virginia's mantras are if a square foot of space exists, develop it (OK, they now say "responsibly"). Unfortunately, during the 1970's and 1980's uncontrolled devlopment spurred by at that time a very pro-developer county government, is very hard to fix. Condos in this area are/will be very, very expensive. The current pipe dream of Fairfax County (and lots of Northern Virginia is to urbanize any area near a Metro station, and to make it a walkable, limited car area. Many of the Silver Line stations in that area do not even have parking, so cars have to continue through, or else you get a bus and sit in the same traffic to get to the Metro station. Finding a residence close to a train station is an easy $40K premium. The more realistic cynical goal is to concentrate the high tech and government contractor workers in a smaller area which is an easier squeeze for taxes or to create a special taxing district.

However, the MUPs are really nice and you can go all the way to Harpers Ferry, WV via the network.

indyfabz

That's a black bear. It was spring, so he hadn't fattened up yet.

Daniel4

Double or triple the cost to make it suitable for one car width and nobody will complain.

burnthesheep

Around here it’s always lots of bond measures getting approved by voters. So you can’t say we didn’t ask for it locally to me.

tcs

$51,000 a linear FOOT (that's just for the hike/bike portion). State engineer refuses to certify it safe to use.

Compare and contrast to the nearby Big R Bridge prefab Joe Ratcliff Walkway over Dallas' 18-lane LBJ freeway/tollway, installed over two nights.

MEversbergII

This worker has coin if they have services.

I know it's generally not fashionable to want things like that, but I'd move to better-served, higher-tax areas if I could. Eying jobs in the general area though being a family man now, it's not easy to come up with the straight, available cash where I'm at to finance not just moving, but maintain a substantial savings to cover mishaps, etc.

Also, my native Maryland blood screams at me whenever I entertain the thought of living with those "Damned Virginians"

M.

Bill in VA

The one thing Maryland does well is having a Master Land Use Plan that prevents one development on top of another and provides for green buffers between developments.

MEversbergII

I am passingly familiar, in that the Development Plan for my area references it I believe. I can't say we're the most "eco" state or anything, but it does seem to be the norm that basically any new development I've seen since ~2000 usually has a light stand of woods between them, at a minimum, or some kind of vacant grassy zone or park. Between them and the main roads as well - some areas look deceptively undeveloped from the highways but satellite views reveal considerable development just hidden behind a strip of woods. Not the case everywhere, and that's just my anecdote (sample size = 1).

M.

no motor?

Where is that? Is it the part that connects with the Fox River Trail?

scotton

Thanks for doing the math for me. I think it wasn't clear in my post (based on a comment by someone) that the car part of the bridge was $130 million. The two "decorative" hike and bike bridge add-ons were an additional $115 million. So the $51K a foot figure is not for the car section as well, that was already paid for by the state (taxpayers).
Looks kinda cool, but apparently it feels like crossing the Grand Canyon on a rope bridge in a tornado.

I used to tell people I lived near Dallas, now I tell them I live near Fort Worth. I didn't move, but my perspective did.

tcs

The auto portion of Dallas' Margaret McDermott Bridge (designed by TexDOT & built on time and on budget) is part of a major freeway/interstate exchange. The decorative, unsafe & unuseable bike bridges (designed by famous bridge architect Santiago Calatrava) go from a busy, six-lane street with no shoulders/sidepath on one end to a busy, six-lane street with no shoulders/sidepath on the other. Neither end ties into any sort of integrated cycle/pedestrian transportation scheme.


Dallas citizens only paid for a portion of these beautiful, dangerous & barricaded cycle bridges. Some of the funding came from the rest of America under the 'shovel ready project' moneys in the 2009 stimulus package.


$51,000 a linear foot.

Hiro11

Nope, though I'd like to know what that trail and bridge along Stearns Road cost to complete. Not cheap, I'll bet. The section I'm talking about is not completed yet. It will branch off the IPP around Army Trail and head north through Pratt's Wayne Woods to connect the trail to the North Central Dupage River trail (a 35 mile trail I've personally never ridden). It should be completed next year. Eventually, you'll be able to ride all the way over to Busse Woods in Schaumburg. This map shows the eventual route:
https://www.dupageco.org/EDP/Bikeways_and_Trails/29855/

There's been a ton of new construction on the IPP over the past year or so and many projects have funding in 2019 and 2020. They're focusing on adding connectors from the IPP to lots of other regional trails. The best place to see all of the news:
IPPc Member Newsletter Archive - Illinois Prairie Path

Phil_gretz

Exactly the situation in my home purchased/built over the winter of 1992/1993 for a spring 1993 closing. We sold the home in 2014, but not until the wettest spring on record had forced water through settling/curing cracks that had been present since the foundation was poured. Another $1500 (fortunately) for a repair suitable to our engineer and the buyer's engineer.

jefnvk

Bridges aren't cheap. We just had a substantially more expensive one installed: https://www.theoaklandpress.com/news...3969218c7.html

tcs

Word. But a municipality/parks department/planning commission can buy a prefab corten bike bridge practically out of a catalog,



or they can go for a signature, world class, budget busting, sorry-there's-no-money-for-anything-else-and-there-won't-be-for-the-next-couple-of-decades 'statement' bike bridge.



(Yes, those big arches just hold up the bike bridges, not the motor vehicle roadway.)

InOmaha

I saw bridge, and my first thought was the environmental impact and wetland mitigation study was probably $1 to $1.5 million of the cost. We had a project that couldn't start because they needed to finish a 6 month bat migration study and then finalize the report. We contracted that one out to a bat specialist who brought his grad students with him. The extra year of interest payment on the land acquisition loan cost more than the study. Compliance isn't cheap. The internal environmental engineers cost close to $500,000 a year in salary and benefits to shepherd the project through the local and federal agency's permitting.

My guess is the bridge covered something the local NRD, state DNR, and/or EPA thought important.

Rails to trails helps mitigate the cost of trails since the infrastructure is in place. It may cost the railroad less to donate old rail lines then it would to do the studies on how to tear them out and to physically remove the mounds and bridges. Tearing up track is easy as they have sepecialized rail cars that maintain the track already.

no motor?

Ah, I see. I live East of Busse Woods and rode the Salt Creek Greenway down to the IPP and Great Western Trails before. This took a lot of meandering around obstacles after some extensive use of online maps to see where the trail eventually headed, and noticed a lot of gaps for both the Prairie path and Great Western trails. It will be nice if they get those connections made and some signage up in other parts where the trails just seem to stop for a while.

Troul 

Grand River/Hagg will always be funded, whereas Walter P. Reuther will always be "under construction".

rydabent

It has to cover the cost of political pay offs and big government.