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East Street Bridge

by Dave Atkins

The top vote-getter so far at our Ped/Bike Safety IdeaScale site has been a suggestion to build a pedestrian tunnel through the East Street bridge. I took a short video this morning...nothing dramatic here, just a typical day at this choke point between the Downey and Islington areas of town:

I was going to film it from the other side--better light and a view into Islington center, but I had the baby stroller and was afraid to attempt to go under the bridge.

Submitted by Dave Atkins on October 8, 2009 - 10:33am
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Comments

East St Bridge

Submitted by Joanie M on October 8, 2009 - 1:54pm.

I hold my breath every time going under this bridge if another car is coming along. And I can not imagine taking my life into my hands and actually walking on that sidewalk. But how do we get this issue addressed? According to this weeks paper, we are a million in the hole or something along those lines. The BOS discussed the lack of finances recently. Time will tell.

Cost and engineering nightmare

Submitted by skidad on October 9, 2009 - 4:48am.

While I certainly agree that this is should be a high priority, and I am certainly no engineering expert, my take on this is that it would be easier to get the entire bridge re-engineered to raise it up, change the support, widen the sidewalk all at once, rather than trying to tunnel through and create support for a bridge/roadway junction that is poorly designed to begin with. It might be easier and cheaper to route the sidewalk up and over the tracks with an automatic crossing gate that would deploy if trains were coming, than to tunnel through underneath.

existing nightmare

Submitted by Dave Atkins on October 21, 2009 - 6:12am.

We discussed this again at our Ped/Bike meeting last week and I am hoping that in the coming weeks, we will form a subcommittee or task force to assess the history and think about how to come up with some long-range solution in a way that meets the concerns of everyone. I keep hearing how this issue is the "third rail" because when it was last addressed, the improvements were designed but then opposed by residents at the time. So whatever is done needs to be done, from the beginning, with the full support of the community...