Gibbs Street Pedestrian Bridge | Complete

[MarkDaMan]

Residents get say on bridge over I-5
Pedestrian span - Sam Adams wants neighbors to slice the $11 million pie
Friday, March 09, 2007
FRED LEESON
The Oregonian

City Commissioner Sam Adams is trying a new strategy for building a South Portland pedestrian bridge over Interstate 5 that might cut costs and allow money for other neighborhood transportation planning.

Adams also vowed late Wednesday to let South Portland Neighborhood Association members have the strongest voice in weighing costs against aesthetics in the bridge design.

"You guys will decide how pretty it should be and how much to pay," Adams said at a neighborhood meeting. "You deserve to be in the driver's seat. I'm making a pledge that I will take your decision and run with it."

Adams' decision may mean the end of a modern design that won public favor in earlier meetings but would eat up all or more of an $11 million budget. The 700-foot pedestrian/bicycle bridge would run below the aerial tram and connect the South Portland neighborhood to the burgeoning South Waterfront District and the Willamette River.

Instead of proceeding with the conceptual design offered last fall, the Portland Office of Transportation will ask design-build teams to submit proposed designs with specified construction costs. A committee heavily weighted with neighborhood residents will then pick which design and price tag it prefers.

Final approval lies with the Portland City Council, but the council probably will accept the recommendation from Adams, who is in charge of city transportation matters.

South Portland residents want any money left over in the $11 million federal allocation to be used for preliminary engineering for the South Portland Circulation Study. Key elements of the study include relocating ramps at the west end of the Ross Island Bridge and narrowing Southwest Naito Parkway.

Reducing obstructions from busy arterials that bisect the neighborhood -- known earlier as Corbett-Terwilliger/Lair Hill -- has been a neighborhood priority since the late 1970s. But the city never has found money to carry out the plan, which Adams said could cost at least $30 million.

Jim Gardner, a South Portland board member, recited a history of four City Council votes supporting the circulation plan. The last came when the council approved the pedestrian bridge as a concession to neighborhood opposition to the tram. Gardner said the $11 million was to include the bridge and preliminary engineering on the other projects.

"To us, that almost seemed like a doublecross" if the bridge uses all $11 million, he said. "How can we find a way to get started on a project that has been a vision of this neighborhood since the late 1970s?"

Adams said road money comes from state gasoline taxes, which have fallen far short of city needs. He said the city has 510 miles of major streets needing maintenance at a cost of $375 million. "We've been in a transportation crisis in this city for the past 10 or 15 years," he said.

"You have a right to be frustrated," Adams told the South Portland group. "The only thing worse would be for me to make promises I can't keep."

Other transportation projects -- such as the tram, light rail and the Portland Streetcar -- used other money sources, he said, and were not built at the expense of roads. He said he is asking the Legislature to increase the state gas tax.

Fred Leeson: 503-294-5946; fredleeson@news.oregonian.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/o...670.xml&coll=7

[designpdx]

Shame on Sam. We will all have to look at this bridge, perhaps design should be important. I am so sick of design being the first budget item to be cut in recent projects.

Sorry, just a quick vent.

[brandonpdx]

oh good maybe we can get another Marquam Bridge!

[PacificNW]

Who knows, designpdx, maybe the South Portland Neighborhood Association will also want good design. One can only hope.

[zilfondel]

Perhaps the design teams will be able to put together an inexpensive yet structurally interesting design. There are some smart people who work for those companies after all...

I think they should bill the shipbuilding company a few extra mil. to get it built. =D

[Dougall5505]

looks like they picked the box girder design, and now there are two branches of the bridge, one connecting bikes with macadam, and the other heading toward the condo towers in the river district
more info including redone pedestrian crossings on naito and barbur and more here: http://www.portlandonline.com/transp...x.cfm?c=43036&

[WonderlandPark]

Originally Posted by Dougall5505

looks like they picked the box girder design

Thank God

[zilfondel]

holy shit!
Looks like Portland is getting to design nirvana... I'm so glad I'm in the design field! Woohoo!

There is hope after all!

===========

question tho: you can bike on Macadam? Where on earth would you bike to?

[cab]

http://www.gobridges.com/article.asp?id=1627

If anyone is interested, here is a good article on the importance of good pedestrian bridge design.

[65MAX]

Originally Posted by zilfondel

There is hope after all!

Finally, they didn't go with the "least expensive" (aka- ugliest) option. Sometimes, you have to invest a LITTLE extra to get a LOT more bang.

[Drew-Ski]

Wow, what an amazing project!.....additions like this foot bridge will help transform the SOWA from a great project into a world class project. Creativity and attention to details will garrenty continued success.

[urbanlife]

well damn, didn't see them going with the good design with this one. Figured with the tram being so over budget they would of built the ugly, cheap bridge. Good to see good architecture winning a few battles in this city finally.

[BrG]

pleasant surprise! they picked the good one!

[tworivers]

Probably not the kind of news we were hoping for.


PDOT strolls past design team on Gibbs Street Pedestrian Bridge
Transportation planners say preliminary designs for the $11 million bridge over Interstate 5 were too costly, so the city’s starting over

POSTED: 06:00 AM PST Wednesday, February 13, 2008
BY LIBBY TUCKER

After hiring KPFF Consulting Engineers and Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects to design three concepts for the Gibbs Street Pedestrian Bridge, city transportation planners have decided to walk on by the team.

Instead, the Portland Office of Transportation decided to reopen the project to new proposals, and last week chose CH2M Hill to oversee final design and public involvement on the $11 million pedestrian bridge over Interstate 5 near the aerial tram in Southwest Portland.

“It’ll probably start fresh this time,” Jody Yates, a project manager for the Portland Office of Transportation, said. “We have a different team.”

Southwest Portland residents for decades have fought for the bike and pedestrian bridge, which would connect the new South Waterfront District with the Corbett-Terwilliger-Lair Hill neighborhood at Southwest Gibbs Street. City Council in 2002 agreed to build the bridge as part of a South Waterfront development agreement, which included the tram and a neighborhood transportation plan.

PDOT in 2006 hired KPFF and ZGF to work up three preliminary designs to help estimate the cost of the bridge and get the ball rolling so the city could fulfill its obligation to the neighborhood, Yates said. In December, the city received six bids for the final design, including one from KPFF and ZGF that did not make the cut.

The Federal Transportation Administration has earmarked nearly $10 million for the project.

And the city has already received $5.7 million from the FTA for the bridge. The remaining $1 million will come from the Portland Development Commission and city transportation system development charges.

“There were some preliminary designs done and (the costs were) … outside of the budget we have,” Yates said.

The KPFF/ZGF project team members, however, disagree that their designs were all over budget and say they were surprised by the decision to start from scratch.

“Our project was capable of being on budget and was well-received by the community, so I don’t know what happened,” Greg Baldwin, with ZGF, said.

Public input on the initial concepts favored the design that came closest to mimicking the angular geometry of the tram, but the bridge was also “substantially” over the target price, Baldwin said. The most basic design came in slightly under budget, he said. And the third design fell in between, about 10 percent over budget, with a cost that the architect says could have been engineered down.

Members of a citizen advisory committee for the bridge, which helped select the final design team, hope to wring even more money out of the budget, however.

“We were promised if we can come under budget, we can use the extra money to work on the South Portland circulation plan,” Ken Love, president of the Southwest Portland Neighborhood Association and a member of the committee, said. “So the design is just going to be simple, and we’re hoping to maybe do some additional artwork on it.”

The final cost of the project is largely up in the air again because the bridge will be completely redesigned. However, the city says it will not allow the cost of the bridge to exceed the budget.

“Sam does not want to spend any more transportation dollars we have at PDOT on a pedestrian bridge,” Roland Chlapowski, transportation policy advisor to Commissioner Sam Adams, said.

The project team that CH2M Hill pulls together will work under ODOT’s “truck load” of design constraints, which govern where the bridge supports can be placed to allow future widening of I-5, Mark Foster, the Federal Highway Administration’s liaison on the project, said. And the difference in elevation between the east and west ends of the bridge is large, which also poses a design challenge, he said.

“The transportation plan really needs to come out of another budget,” Baldwin said. “I don’t think it’s possible to dramatically lower the cost of the bridge, but I could be wrong.”

City Council today will consider signing an inter-governmental agreement with the Oregon Department of Transportation giving the city the go-ahead to build the bridge over I-5.

Construction on the bridge is scheduled to begin no later than the fall of 2009 to meet federal funding requirements, according to the city.

[pdxman]

Why does this not surprise me? It seems like every proposed project in Portland goes over-budget. Maybe they can just build a zip-line to go over I5 Cheap and fun!

[Diffbean]

^ Maybe they should just start building stuff instead of hiring and firing the design teams and wasting all the monies on administrative tasks. This is just one in a long line of wasted time and funds (greenway, sw park, etc). It is looking more and more like the city does not care about the design in SoWa.

[CUclimber]

Great, another delay. I live 3 blocks from the site of the bridge (on Corbett) and I was really hoping that it would get built in the next 2-3 years.

[MarkDaMan]

Members of a citizen advisory committee for the bridge, which helped select the final design team, hope to wring even more money out of the budget, however.

“We were promised if we can come under budget, we can use the extra money to work on the South Portland circulation plan,” Ken Love, president of the Southwest Portland Neighborhood Association and a member of the committee, said. “So the design is just going to be simple, and we’re hoping to maybe do some additional artwork on it.”

There is something seriously sick about that...the ped bridge design, which will be there for a hundred years or more, shouldn't be sacrificed so they can plan for better circulation off the Ross Island bridge. They are two separate projects and one shouldn't have to sacrifice budget and design in order to make another long shot possibility move an inch forward.

If they want cheap, someone should transpose the Failing Street Ped Bridge into a rendering to show them what cheap and ugly looks like.

[sowat]

South Waterfront has been buzzing lately with new improvement projects, from Greensways and Neighborhood parks to the ground breaking of the Mirabella. Let’s add one more to the growing list - the Gibbs St. Pedestiran Bridge, linking us to our neighbors to the West.

The firm working on this project, CH2MHILL, is asking for public input on the design options for the bridge and have a public survey posted on their site to collect our input. Here is a link to their site:
http://www.gibbsbridge.org/Surveys.aspx

This survey is open until June 15th, so please try and add your input as soon as possible. Here is a link to the survey: Gibbs St. Survey. They will also be holding an Open House on June 25th - the location has not been solidified yet, so be sure to check back soon.

http://southwaterfront.com/transport...strian-bridge/

[sowat]

Gibbs Street bridge updates

Home page:
http://www.gibbsbridge.org/home.aspx

Meetings:
http://www.gibbsbridge.org/Meetings.aspx

with links to Open House Display Boards:
http://www.gibbsbridge.org/MeetingMa...ds_10.6.08.pdf
(PDF)
and Open House Display Boards - 3D Images:
http://www.gibbsbridge.org/MeetingMa...es_10.6.08.pdf
(PDF)