Tram neighbors pick favorite bridge design
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Fred Leeson
The Oregonian
Standing like a giant modern-art scarecrow, the 195-foot-tall tram tower greets motorists sweeping north on Interstate 5 past the gentle curve at Corbett Avenue.
That iconic view at downtown's portal could have another striking element in three years: a 700-foot-long pedestrian bridge crossing over the freeway between Southwest Kelly Avenue and the burgeoning new South Waterfront condo village. It would be the first overpass to meet motorists' eyes heading into downtown.
As the bridge design unfolds, residents leery of the tram are worried about the span, too: Will there be cost overruns? Will there be money left to improve other traffic snags?
The City Council approved the bridge concept as an accommodation to a neighborhood that vehemently opposed the tram. The council also considered it a step in atoning for past transportation sins.
"In the beginning, there was a neighborhood that was thriving," says John Breshears, an architect for the Zimmer Gunsul Frasca firm designing the bridge. "Slowly, it began to get cut to pieces."
South Portland's street grid started changing with the Ross Island Bridge in 1926. It suffered more damage from Barbur Boulevard, I-5, Interstate 405 and an extension of Naito Parkway. "Slowly but surely, it began to look like a mess," Breshears says.
The bridge won't solve all those problems. But it will allow walkers and bicyclists to safely cross the freeway to reach the Willamette River, the tram and a new park. "It's the first time we're building something for the neighborhood and not for someone else," says Greg Baldwin, a ZGF partner who has studied transportation projects since the early 1970s.
At two public workshops, residents said they prefer an open, airy design with clean lines. Of three proposed designs, the front-runner is a box-girder structure in which slanting triangular girders would sit below the 14-foot-wide deck, leaving the top to be protected by simple screens.
Breshears calls the box-girder model "an exquisite piece of infrastructure" that would complement the tram tower. Residents at a second workshop preferred the box-girder model nearly 2-to-1 over two steel truss structures.
The Portland Design Commission also weighed in with a strong preference for the modernistic design.
But the box-girder bridge is probably the most expensive. Some fear it would eat up most of the $11 million in federal transportation funds. Presumably, anything left could help implement a South Portland Circulation Study aimed at untangling the neighborhood streetscape.
"We don't want the bridge to take all of it," says Jim Gardner, a director of the South Portland Neighborhood Association. "The circulation study is our number one priority, not the bridge."
Baldwin notes that the bridge allocation was never intended to solve all the neighborhood problems. Bill Hoffman, project manager for the Portland Office of Transportation, says, "It's going to be a challenge to get the bridge built for what we have. If we can squeeze more out of it, great."
The City Council is expected to select a bridge design sometime next year. Tentative bridge completion date: 2010.
Fred Leeson: 503-294-5946;
fredleeson@news.oregonian.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/o...830.xml&coll=7
detailed rendering here:
http://www.portlandonline.com/shared....cfm?id=136477
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The triangles look pretty cool. They are similar to the triangles in the tower.
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