The new 35W bridge.

[Clifford63]

Originally Posted by Ben Around

Yes, of course its purpose is to bring traffic across the river and it does that quite well. But my point is that all the hype and public proclamations of what a great aesthetic design the new bridge would have just never materialized. It has all the drama of the Hwy 36 bridge over Snelling Avenue, the Franklin Avenue bridge over 280, the Lexington Parkway Bridge over 94, and hundreds of other boring bridges here in the TC and coast to coast. Hell, the bike bridge over Hiawatha Avenue has a more impressive design!

PS: Do you think people get "distracted" on the Golden Gate Bridge or the Brooklyn Bridge? Do you guys care about aesthetics at all, or must all public projects display Soviet-style functionality?.

yea sure I care about astetics, but they did run the design through a rigourous approval procces, and there were no secrets.

My priorties were safety, rebuilding it fast, and cost. The Feds gave X dollars to put up a new one, and I am not really interested in kicking in more tax dollars to build a pretty bridge.

In my opinion it has a modern type look that is reasonably appealing and better looking than the old bridge.

Given the circumstances, we are very lucky to have a new bridge in place so soon.

[Haver]

If the road was straight and didn't have a lot of merging traffic and volume was light and speeds were in the sedate 40 mph range and the road didn't run through a neighborhood with more than its share of sketchy, marginal drivers (university students, etc) then yeah, bump up the aesthetics, give me something to look at. But that's one scary stretch of road. So ... Da, Komrade!! Make it all bland and gray for the greater glory of the people's collective!