The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge | Hacker News Reader

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge

tylervigen.com

1,028 pointsgraypegg264 comments

Author here! Glad you all enjoyed the article. It was a fun journey into the history of my community.

For the record: I am an advocate of walkability and think there should be more bridges, not fewer. I just wondered how that one got there given the context of limited walkability in the area.

That was a great read, particularly the frequent hidden notes :) thanks for taking such an immense amount of time to research and write it all up.

The notes are so good and so amusing that the article is worth reading just to enjoy the notes. Don't miss this rabbit-from-hat moment:

Believe it or not, I was specifically trained by the military as a geo-spatial analyst to identify bridges in black and white aerial photographs taken in the 1960s.

Also... @tylervigen, the note after "Peter Wilson of the Bridges Division got back to me very quickly" doesn't work for me in either of the browsers I tried. I want to know what about Peter Wilson of the Bridges Division getting back to you quickly merited a note!

From the page source:

This is an understatement. I sent an email to the Department of Transportation at 11:00PM on Wednesday and Peter responded at 7:48AM on Thursday, which is ZERO BUSINESS HOURS later. This is the fastest response to a data request I have ever received.

You are clever and that was worth it. Thanks!

Most of them, including that one, pop up the full note text if you mouse over (annoying UI but helped for that one note). I appreciate that the notes worked without javascript :).

Glad someone appreciated it, because it was a lot of additional work to do it that way!

As well as

> By the way, about these epic pics: you can't just fly a drone this close to the airport without getting in trouble with the Federal Aviation Administration. This is restricted airspace. That's why I went through the process of requesting and receiving drone flight clearance from the FAA, just so I could show you these photos. You're welcome.

Fixed! Sorry about that. It's an artifact of my stubborn refusal to use any web editing tools other than Notepad++.

Really enjoyed the article! Your tenacity was impressive.

You see these "bridges to nowhere" in analogous places in a lot of the midwest. I think the city planner nailed it - it was built in anticipation of development. I.e., back in the 60's they made guesses about growth and some of those guesses were wrong. There are probably many others, but these catch our attention because they're 50 feet up in the air.

Honestly, you see this all over the world where anticipated development either hasn't materialised or funds have dried up. The A57(M) freeway through Manchester, England was planned to continue from its current endpoint southwards, but the rest of it... never happened. And now there's a bridge over the A34 that doesn't connect to anywhere.

As I recall, the M1 emerging from London starts at "Junction 4" and there were three more junctions planned deeper into central London, but that part of the road never happened either.

Great article!

Reminded me of the "Leave as you found" rule:

Say you're hiking through some fields, and come upon a fence. If it's open, don't close it. If it's closed, don't pass through leaving it open.

Why? Because building a fence takes effort. Maintaining it too. And if whoever built that fence left it open, probably had a good reason to do so.

Read: until you understand why it's there & in the state it's in, don't mess with that. If you do know who put the thing there & how it's used, then by all means have at it.

And the detective work here: hacker spirit in optima forma! Kudoz to the author.

This is more specifically known as Chesterton’s Fence:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence

I really enjoyed this. I did not really know where it was going at first but it got really interesting. My daughter is in school to become an Archivist so it really started to get my attention as I went further into it.

I do have to say in the beginning of the post, I was thinking it was going to end up being about pork and politics and in a sense that is how it ended.

I loved this so much ... "While I am dedicated to this search, I am not about to fly down to Kansas City to dig through federal archives, especially when those documents may or may not be there...

...just kidding. Of course I flew down to Kansas City to dig through the federal archives"

Thanks for creating this

If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy two videos from CGP Grey:

- The Race to Win Staten Island (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex74x_gqTU0)

- Someone dead ruined my life... again (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ)

I usually prefer reading to videos but those were excellent. Thanks for the share

I thought of these as well while reading the article as they convey the fun aspects of archival visits well (I’ve done a bit of my own and really enjoyed the random “side quest” things you discover along the way).

If anyone else has recommendations for things like these (text or video) then I would love to see more!

This was such a fun read and a fantastic little mystery.

Thank you so much for sharing your project with the world and for making it so entertaining. (Glad you found the smoking gun, too.)

Thanks for the thorough research, not just on-line, but including calling people.

I occasionally go down rabbit holes like this and I have not gotten the helpful responses from officials I have contacted in the New England area. I don't know if I was telegraphing some agenda the officials did not want to further, or if it was because you were dealing with "Minnesota nice" people. I first heard of Minnesota nice when a curmudgeonly co-worker was grumbling about calling Anderson Window, "I hate calling them, they are so effing nice!"

This article is so wholesome, thank you. I was going to just scroll through it real quick, but I got so engrossed and read every word. I died laughing about the Kansas City bit!

This is the third place I’ve encountered your work in as many days. I first read it from a social media post, then saw it had been covered in the Star Tribune, and now here. Good to see such hard work getting noticed and appreciated.

This was great. I too go on these ridiculous local history research binges, but I've never had a good model of how to write one up. So thanks for the interesting story, and the template.

I enjoyed reading this. Write more, you're good at it.

Thanks! Means a lot!

There were fascinating protests against footbridges when first created in London, as the people felt they were losing their priority against the car. I copied out these notes from the book Leadville about the history of the A40 and the building of the first footbridge here https://www.flickr.com/photos/justincormack/256217251

The Bridge of Fools, the first footbridge over a road in Britain

In 1938 the inhabitants started to protest about the rising death toll on Western Avenue, the "Avenue of Speed and Death". They petitioned the Ministry of Transport to impose a speed limit of twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. The ministry said that would be an "ingenious provision" to save lives, but it would be against "the whole object of constructing a road free from congested traffic".

On 21 July 1938 the protestors filed across Western Avenue from the Approach, and then back, causing a huge tailback. The next day the Ministry arranged to build two bridges, one here and one by Gipsy Corner, much to the disgust of the protestors, who thought it would encourage cars to drive faster and to force pedestrians off more roads onto bridges and subways. A week later a thousand people demonstrated again for "their right to cross on the level".

In September the hastily erected bridge was complete, and five hundred people demonstrated against it again. The bridge became a tourist attraction and it was "quite usual to see people from other districts coming to look at it".

In October torchlight processions were held on the road every evening for a week, with a dog with a red light attached to it and four bearers carrying a coffin, and placards saying "We want crossings not coffins".

The war brought and end to the protests, and for a few years the traffic.

from Leadville: A Biography of the A40 by Edward Platt

Sounds like the kind of hypocrisy you'd hear from "urbanists" today: Complain about pedestrian deaths, then complain about a thing that prevents them.

It’s amusing how nobody complains about pedestrian infrastructure over and under trains.

Isn't that because most people understand that trains don't drive on sight?

Railways are for trains, roads are for people.

If you look at it superficially - everything is people transport - it can look hypocritical. But the issue is with the externalities each of those apparently equivalent decisions create. Cars and trains are certainly not that similar beyond "transporting people".

A drug den isn't a hospital just because drugs are administered there. A diesel and an EV are not the same just because they only differ in fuel source. You treat them differently, you try to encourage the positive externalities and discourage the negative ones.

Some people have seen it coming a long time ago that as a society we are encouraging cars and their infrastructure too much and among other things we're giving up some (maybe too much?) individual freedom in favor of them. And wouldn't you know it, a century later we're aiming at making cities walkable again, even banning cars entirely in some areas, as proof that society is realizing those concerns weren't at all hypocritical.

Yes we do. There are pedestrian level crossings in the UK but because there is the very occasional fatality they are increasingly replaced by bridges. This is a huge inconvenience for the vast majority of us who are capable of looking both ways and we do complain about it.

Ever heard the saying ”wrong side of the tracks”?

Why should pedestrians be forced to clamber over bridges for the convenience of drivers?

Drivers are the one with huge mechanical advantage, make them go up and down, don’t force the local pedestrians who live in the to take huge detour, just so drivers from out of town can save 30 seconds.

Those are good points, but the simple argument to the contrary is a matter of cost. It costs a whole lot less to build a foot bridge over a road than to build a road bridge over a foot path.

Yes cost is the obvious elephant in the room. But ultimately all these things come down to priorities. Do we prioritise building human scale environments that are welcoming and pleasant to people, or do bulldoze that for car scale places that are hostile and unpleasant for people, unless they’re wrapped in tons of metal?

Turning all of spaces in car centric spaces also has cost, it’s just less obvious. Many time building that car bridge is cheaper for a government, if it helps keep people out of cars, and removes the huge number of negative externalities that car ownership brings.

The cost of building the structure is hardly the only cost involved. Either solution means a cost or benefit to the two different groups that you can't just ignore away.

Bridges are still very real obstacles to people in wheelchairs, bikes, with strollers or shopping carts, or just mobility impaired in general.

True generally, although many Tokyo pedestrian bridges have narrow ramp space reserved adjacent to the steps so that people with bicycles can walk them up to or down from bridge level with considerably less difficulty than if only steps were provided. The remaining cases are not addressed in these designs, though.

The speed limit was indeed reduced, in 2020, to 30 mph on the elevated eastern section of the A40 (Westway), but remains 40 mph on the Western Avenue part.

As others have said, it was an enjoyable read, and I thank you (and everyone else involved) for caring. One small bit of feedback: I suggest being a bit more subtle about how much work you did. At times I wondered if you were telling us things just to try to impress us with your dedication rather than because they were an important part of the story.

Huh, it didn't struck me as such. But maybe because I read it partially over the course of the day.

In any case the author DID make a lot of effort researching this and I can imagine it was not always pleasant hitting dead ends.

Have you spoken with Roman Mars yet? I hope this will be a 99% Invisible episode soon.

Sadly, Howard Kyllo passed away

https://www.startribune.com/obituaries/detail/0000423925/

The UK has many similar pedestrian bridges crossing motorways and other major roads. There must be thousands of them throughout the country! Wherever there is an existing right of way (ie: foot path or bridal path) you can't just block it by building a motorway or other obstruction. So usually that means building a bridge!

True for motorways, but even on busy dual carriageways sometimes the planners just say "the footpath crosses the dual carriageway on the flat", ignoring that this comes pretty near to being an effective closure of the right of way; there are some on the A14 near me like that.

This forum thread lists some other examples: https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41259

There are a couple of instances of this on the A45 just after you leave Coventry going towards Birmingham. Some of these were later closed off entirely (the A45 has been there a long time, but some roads I used to cycle on 15 years ago and now closed). There's one or two that I would take my chance on when cycling, but there's simply no way to cross safely as a pedestrian because of the curvature of the road restricting visibility and the speed limit. One nice change is that the new road junctions to Birmingham airport now mean that there are more cycleable bridges again.

As to the GP's comment, since I got a gravel bike, I've been exploring a lot of random routes that are basically underused footpaths (because they don't really go anywhere useful) that cross the motorway in delightfully over-engineered ways, for instance a narrow path through a field of crops, a stile then a nice tarmac'd two lane bridge and a stile to another field on the other side.

Y’all even have bridges for boats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontcysyllte_Aqueduct

Also for wildlife.

France: https://voyage.aprr.fr/articles/ecoponts-au-service-du-vivan...

Nagging thought of mine that gets brought up by the comment that there are two overpasses on each side of it. Which is those carry car traffic which makes them dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists. It would be a good idea to build more pedestrian/bicycle only overpasses one street over from the car overpasses.

We need a bunch of pre-fab structural designs that municipalities can put in quickly and affordable for various span lengths.

The American river could benefit a ton from this, as can all sorts of waterways in urban environments. Every bridge doesn't need to be unique and if we had a design contest which balanced aesthetics with durability and quality we should have a library of several design styles and have them placed over thin waters everywhere

We need federal “no permit” guidelines for such - often the cost of the materials and labor is the lowest part.

You often end up having to determine if the waterway is considered “navigable” even if nobody could ever run a boat up it.

I suspect that some of the bridges that lead to "parks" may have been leading to schools that no longer exist where those parks are now.

Might be worth digging into the history of those few parks.

Many parks around me in the bay area started life as the field for a school. Then the school closed as the boomers cycled through and it became just a park.

I did actually check for that! I didn't see schools nearby enough to make sense for the ones I labeled "park."

> … limited walkability in the area.

One thing that I really like about your article, aside from the many things that others have already mentioned, is that it shows how much perceptions have changed. 50 years ago, this area was so easily walked that schoolchildren walked to and from school every day. Families walked to church every week. They didn’t need a dozen shops on every block in order to make walking worth–while. They didn’t care about a few parking lots even completely empty lots. They didn’t need sidewalks to feel safe while walking, or bicycle lanes.

Today we say that it has “limited walkability”.

Today over 7000 pedestrians are killed in the U.S. every year, and the number is going up, not down.

Today cars are heavier, faster, and more deadly to pedestrians than ever before.

Today isn’t a good time to be a pedestrian in the U.S.

Most interestingly, the number of pedestrian deaths has only been going up very recently, since 2010. Before that it was decreasing.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

Plus, pedestrian deaths are most likely at night, presumably due to the decreased visibility. The statistics also show the lowest death rate amongst children, and the highest amongst the elderly (with middle–aged adults barely overtaking the elderly in this race in the last couple of years). School children thus seem to be the least at risk, though I don’t know why; it could be because they no longer walk to and from school, or it could be because they are more likely to survive an accident than the elderly are, but neither of those explain the much larger drop in deaths amongst the elderly pedestrians. And of course national averages tell us nothing about the specific location in question.

Still, I agree that the pedestrian accident rate really ought to be lower. A lot lower! I also think that the pedestrian accident rate is just not high enough to declare that areas like this are unsafe to walk in. Especially with a dedicated pedestrian bridge that allows people to avoid the car traffic at the busy service interchanges to the east and west.

No, when people talk about the “walkability” of an area, they are almost always talking about the sheer density of businesses in the area not about safety. How they can walk to the grocery store, and their dentist, and their favorite bar, and also three different art galleries. How everything they need is never more than a 15–minute walk away. How each parking lot represents a wasted opportunity, because there are no services there, and nobody lives there either.

But when this bridge was built they clearly were willing to walk further to access vital services like the school, past any number of parking lots. People are just a lot pickier today than they were in the past.

> No, when people talk about the “walkability” of an area, they are almost always talking about the sheer density of businesses in the area not about safety. How they can walk to the grocery store, and their dentist, and their favorite bar, and also three different art galleries. How everything they need is never more than a 15–minute walk away. How each parking lot represents a wasted opportunity, because there are no services there, and nobody lives there either.

I guess I’m confused why people wouldn’t want this. Walking through empty car parks is unpleasant, and discouraging people from doing it, and it’s obviously not benefiting drivers either. I’m lucky enough to live in place where I can walk to shops, parks, cafes, transport etc etc within 15-20mins, and do so under cover of trees, surrounded by green, and without crossing roads due to well designed pedestrian facilities. This is all in a medium built area, and leads to wonderful quality of life. Why wouldn’t people want to live like this?

Visiting the U.S. I’m honestly bamboozled that people seem to want live surrounded by car parks, having to drive from place to place, because walking is almost impossible. Not just due to car parks, but also because the boundaries between car parks and businesses seemed to be designed to prevent foot traffic. The U.S. strange belief that good walkability is something that can’t happen in the U.S. for reasons, is right up there with the U.S. belief that effective gun control can’t be implemented in U.S. for reasons, or trains and public transport can’t be implemented in the U.S. for reasons either.

All off strikes me as weird given how much evidence that these thing can work in a country like the U.S., with plenty of that evidence existing in the U.S. own past! There’s an old quote attributed to Churchill that I think summarises my views very succinctly “You can depend upon the Americans to do the right thing. But only after they have exhausted every other possibility.”. I look forward to the day the U.S. has exhausted every other possibility, no doubt they’ll learn plenty of valuable lessons for everyone else along the way.

Nobody in this thread is disagreeing with you, and in fact, a vast majority of Americans do want walkable cities according to this survey I just googled: https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/new-nar-survey-finds-americ...

GP is just pointing out its interesting our tolerance for long walks seems to have decreased, which is not a commonly discussed factor. Also that pedestrian safety is not necessarily why people do not want to walk. (I agree with this, I don't think average people think about it at all. Though I do think they think about it for bikes.) Perhaps lowering costs of car transport or increased comfort or something like that contributed.

Correct.

However, I do partly disagree with avianlyric:

> I guess I’m confused why people wouldn’t want this. > Visiting the U.S. I’m honestly bamboozled that people seem to want…

It is very parochial to believe that everyone will want the same things as you.

Some people want open fields of wildflowers, farmland, pastures, creeks, shady forests, mountain paths, and perhaps a few neighbors. You can’t get any of that in an urban area. Yes, you might find parks and shaded avenues in a nice urban area, but those are a far cry from real nature.

Many others want to live in a suburban area. They want everything within 15 minutes walk of them to be a school, or a church, or a neighbor’s house. They want to sit in the back yard with a cold drink on a hot day and hear children playing near by, with the drone of a lawn mower in the distance. They want to build a deck there in the back yard, and invite their friends over for dinner on that deck. They want to plant an oak tree when they move in, and one day hang a rope swing from it for their grandchildren to swing on.

For these people, driving to a grocery store and parking in parking lots are just things they put up with in order to get what they really want.

> It is very parochial to believe that everyone will want the same things as you.

I appreciate the point you make, and I certainly don’t believe that everyone wants the same things I do.

But I also think that it’s false dichotomy to say you can either have walkability or you can have cars and car parks. That’s simply not true.

The Netherlands has plenty of fantastic examples of cities, towns, villages, business parks and industrial areas that are all friendly to pedestrians and bikes, and not just endless slabs of asphalt. Plentiful public transport, that makes it easy to get anywhere without a car. I personally don’t accept the idea that cars are essential for people to have options in their living environments, to say they are just strikes me as an immense lack of imagination.

> For these people, driving to a grocery store and parking in parking lots are just things they put up with in order to get what they really want.

Your point here would carry more weight, if it was legal in the U.S. to build anything except huge empty suburbs, with soulless car park shops miles away. US planning law simply doesn’t allow any other form of building, so people can’t choose anything else. There are obviously small fragments of the U.S. that buck this trend, built before modern planning laws, but there’s so much demand for them, only the wealthiest can afford to live there.

>> For these people, driving to a grocery store and parking in parking lots are just things they put up with in order to get what they really want.

> Your point here would carry more weight, if it was legal in the U.S. to build anything except huge empty suburbs, with soulless car park shops miles away.

This is completely and utterly false. Any laws governing what can and cannot be built are entirely _local_. There are no laws that govern construction on a national scale, or even a state–wide scale.

And you are the one that judges a suburb to be “empty”, and the parking lots to be “soulless”. That is just your opinion; not everyone shares it. The majority of people in America prefer suburbs precisely because it maximizes the type of neighborhood that they want and choose to live in.

The US use a zoning systems almost to the exclusion of any form of planning system, and pretty simple zoning systems at that. As a general rule the zoning systems simply don't allow mix used zones, you simply can't build a shop or business in a residential area. As a consequence you force a design where shops and homes must be kept physically separated, and usually with a significant distance between them.

Are there exceptions to these patterns? Of course there are, but a general rule, zoning with no mixed used land areas is the only allowed development pattern.

> The majority of people in America prefer suburbs precisely because it maximizes the type of neighborhood that they want and choose to live in.

What are you basing this on? Just because it dominant doesn't mean people want. Stupidly expensive healthcare bills are dominant in the US, do you think people want that?

Where mixed used developments exist in the US, demand far outstrips supply, resulting in crazy high house prices. Given the huge premium these developments command, you have ask the question, why doesn't more of it exist? People are willing to pay, so aren't other people taking that cash? Mixed used, walkable developments demand much higher $/sqft than suburban development does, and is cheaper to construct due to the density. So all the right market signals for medium and high density development exist, what's preventing the market from responding?

> And you are the one that judges a suburb to be “empty”, and the parking lots to be “soulless”. That is just your opinion; not everyone shares it

True, it's an opinion. But are you honestly trying to argue that Americans find parking lots soulful? I'm not sure what you find so exciting about a featureless slab of asphalt with some painted lines on it, but I've yet to encounter a parking lot with architectural protection, or awards for beauty.

> The US use a zoning systems almost to the exclusion of any form of planning system, and pretty simple zoning systems at that. As a general rule the zoning systems simply don't allow mix used zones, you simply can't build a shop or business in a residential area. As a consequence you force a design where shops and homes must be kept physically separated, and usually with a significant distance between them.

Yes, this is true. But remember that these rules are not the same everywhere, and they are not imposed nationally. Cities and towns are largely free to choose their own zoning laws. In the 50s and 60s they overwhelmingly voted to change them to allow suburban areas, and a huge percentage of the population moved to those areas. They did this because _they wanted to live in a suburban environment_. They weren’t forced into it.

>> The majority of people in America prefer suburbs precisely because it maximizes the type of neighborhood that they want and choose to live in.

> What are you basing this on? Just because it dominant doesn't mean people want. Stupidly expensive healthcare bills are dominant in the US, do you think people want that?

Don’t be ridiculous; of course nobody voted for higher medical bills. During the war, employers were largely prohibited from raising salaries to attract employees, so they had to resort to perks like medical insurance instead. After the war the practice became nearly universal. Higher prices for medical services was an _unintended consequence_ of that change.

Meanwhile people voted for suburban zoning _because they wanted it_. It wasn’t an unintended consequence, it was the _intended_ consequence.

> Where mixed used developments exist in the US, demand far outstrips supply, resulting in crazy high house prices.

This is true today, but remember that we are talking about nearly 80 years of change here since the war. In the 80s and 90s demand for mixed–use development was super low. People had moved out of urban areas by the tens of millions, and very few wanted to move back. _Today_ there is much more interest, as generational changes kick in.

My Grandfather on my father’s side came back from the Pacific theater, purchased a farm, and raised 9 children. This was not for lack of skill or education either; he wanted peace above all else. After a couple of decades or so he sold the farm and moved to a suburban area in a small town, where he took a job as an electrical engineer at a hydroelectric power plant.

To house all of the children he raised the new house by a whole story, dug out a basement below it (the house was on a hill, so that eliminated about half of the digging), then built a whole bunch of bedrooms down there plus a really nice workbench.

His children (my Aunts and Uncles), had a lot more interest in travel and adventure than he did (having gotten his fill during the war), but they all lived in quiet suburban areas, not urban ones. Among the many many grandchildren there are some who live in bustling cities with nightlife, but not all of them.

>> And you are the one that judges a suburb to be “empty”, and the parking lots to be “soulless”. That is just your opinion; not everyone shares it

> True, it's an opinion. But are you honestly trying to argue that Americans find parking lots soulful?

Seriously? Are you deliberately misreading what I wrote? I said that most people _don’t care_ about parking lots, and I meant it. A parking lot is neither a positive nor a negative aspect of life; it's just a place you spend a few minutes at before and after you do your weekly grocery shopping. The rest of the time it never enters people’s thoughts. Home is the important place that people think about; parking lots don’t matter.

> Meanwhile people voted for suburban zoning because they wanted it. It wasn’t an unintended consequence, it was the intended consequence.

Ah I understand your point better now. But I would position that people at the time probably didn’t completely understand what they were giving up when they instituted those laws. I’m not trying to claim they were stupid or ignorant, suburban style land development simply wasn’t possible before then, and I can why that lifestyle would be seductive if the consequences of such development simply weren’t known.

> People had moved out of urban areas by the tens of millions, and very few wanted to move back. Today there is much more interest, as generational changes kick in.

I think to claim it’s just generational change (which suggest the change is a bit of a fad) is overly reductive. Instead I would argue the consequences, and costs, of suburban sprawl are now much better understood, and its long term unsustainability is becoming apparent. Ultimately a mono-culture, whether in biology or in land development tends to result in bad outcomes, and current U.S. planning doctrine enforces an unhealthy monoculture.

> His children (my Aunts and Uncles), had a lot more interest in travel and adventure than he did (having gotten his fill during the war), but they all lived in quiet suburban areas, not urban ones. Among the many many grandchildren there are some who live in bustling cities with nightlife, but not all of them.

Again there are more flavour of land development and residential design than suburbia, or city. They represent two extreme ends of scale, if you only give people a choice of two extremes, you shouldn’t be surprised when you end up with two large clusters of behaviour.

> Seriously? Are you deliberately misreading what I wrote?

Hey! You’re the one that wrote

> and the parking lots to be “soulless”. That is just your opinion; not everyone shares it

The opposite of soulless is soulful. You claim that not everyone shares my view, which by necessity means you make the argument that some people find parking lots soulful.

> it. A parking lot is neither a positive nor a negative aspect of life; it's just a place you spend a few minutes at before and after you do your weekly grocery shopping. The rest of the time it never enters people’s thoughts.

That’s kind of the point. Parking lots take huge slabs of potential useful land, and make it almost useless be design. Sure nobody thinks about a parking lot, to say that means their existence is inconsequential is foolish and completely the huge opportunity cost. That thoughtless nothingness could have been a field, an open park or some other productive public amenity. Hell just leave it as unmaintained grass, it massively improves water and runoff management. Instead it’s a slab of asphalt, with its huge negative externalities in the form of contributing to urban heat islanding, increased rain runoff in drains, and reduced water holding capacity on the ground below. Parking lots aren’t free and without consequence, they contribute plenty in turning a potential lush green area into a lifeless desert.

Drivers back then sat at half the height above the road compared to now, and their forward viewspace was about half again as big as it is now.

Big cars kill pedestrians.

You missed a bridge in your map! There’s another random pedestrian bridge over 394 near Louisiana. Connects some strip malls to a Burger King and car dealership. I finally used it when I went for a run to pick up my car from the dealer

Actually skipping those two was intentional! They were built in the 1990s, but I was specifically looking for pedestrian bridges built in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The reasons for building bridges seemed to shift over the decades, so I wanted to focus in on the ones built in the same era as the interstates were being built out.

I have a few ghost mine stories I would like to dig deeper on, but the people who worked on the tunnels, are dead. I would like to connect and see if I can't learn more. Anywho, this is inspirational and good shooting, tex.

The question I was left with at the end was: is the Catholic school still there at the church? If so, do the students still walk/ride to school using the bridge?

Exceedingly interesting and impressive amounts of dedication.

There is also a lesson in there about endless chasing of technical details instead of going straight to the source of all mysteries: power and the people that hold it.

Many software challenges can be looked at through the same lens. Why is this project even a thing and why, o, why is it $25M over budget and getting nowhere? (Hint: nothing technical)

That was one of my takeaways as well. Nothing beats primary sources and aligned incentives.

Also just as a practical matter: Professionals are required to track the money and engineering, so there's bound to be a paper trail. No one has a good reason to write down the "why" unless it's a cool story to retell. Even then, the details behind the story wouldn't be included.

If anything this renewed my respect for journalism and historians.

Just keeping a bunch of boxes with papers around is quite useless without knowing why they exist in the first place.

Yes definitely. Though in this case it's kinda awesome that he mayor insisted on some accomodations for his constituents?

He could have just been bribed by the superhighway folks and ignored his constituents, and maybe they would have sucked it up ...

Fantastic read. I'm impressed at how forthcoming various US city officials and employees are about giving away infrastructure plans to anyone who demands it.

Freedom of Information act, sure. But try gaining access to the same level of info that Tyler got here in a country like Germany[0]. In theory very easy, in practice you will be sent in a vicious circle of disinterested officials passing the buck.

0: https://www.dpma.de/english/our_office/law/freedom_of_inform...

I imagine even in Germany the officials would enjoy dealing with a kind person expressing enthusiasm about some obscure records and is willing to put in work themselves. It's not like US public employees are famed for not passing the buck.

In my experience these city officials are almost overjoyed that someone is even asking the question.

They have little community meetings when talking about developments and road/bike changes and almost nobody attends them unless there is a big controversy.

I actually enjoyed it and got undivided attention from multiple planners and left feeling they knew a lot more about it than I did and had though of lots of the concerns you could bring up.

I've had the same experience. I once noticed that a section of local highway had been restriped so instead of it being just white dashes it had white dashes followed immediately by a brief black dash. This is a fairly light colored concrete highway that runs east-west.

I was curious about this new striping, emailed, and very quickly got an interesting and friendly response about how they are studying this new striping technique because it makes the lines more visible. Being light colored pavement, running east-west (facing sunrise/sunset), and in an area where it rains frequently (which changes the pavement color) this made a ton of sense.

I think that asking a technical question politely was a big help, but the folks who replied seemed more like talking with a fellow engineer who was excited to explain why they are doing what they are doing.

(I've had other similar experiences when asking questions about / suggesting light timing changes, etc.)

I’ve been listening to City Planner Plays on YouTube as he plays City Skylines and he has quite interesting patter about the behind the scenes work for development. Many interesting things come up you might not even realize.

I was just driving through a construcion zone, heading east at about 9:00AM so the sun angle was still pretty low. The lanes had been rerouted several times, and the old markings were ground off but this still left lighter stripes in the concrete where the paint had been. In that lighting it was very difficult to distinguish the currently-painted lanes and the old, now ground-off lane markings. As I made my way through, I found myself wondering how a self-driving car would cope.

A self-driving car has many more sensors dedicated to driving than your own body. Of course, the power is in the brain that processes that data.

The community meetings are an extremely bad idea with no benefit. Basically, planners are embarrassed about Robert Moses doing too much to NYC, so now whenever they have an idea they feel obligated to have a meeting where only people who want to stop it show up.

In LA when Metro doesn't really want to do some transit project they've announced, they just spend all the money on community meetings until it runs out.

I was pleasantly impressed too! I've always had good luck getting replies from officials, but I got particularly good responses from the folks named in the article.

Glad you enjoyed it!

My (least) favorite pedestrian bridge curiosity:

https://goo.gl/maps/dJZew2G2EJJcEgvP9

    42°21'21.6"N 71°06'49.6"W
    Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

Look at how far a pedestrian has to walk, just to cross a 4-lane street, to get to the park. And close to half the walk is uphill, just to elevate over the street.

Every time I see it, it makes me angry. (Partly because this ridiculous imposition of a pedestrian bridge is emblematic of the area's crazy emphasis on cars. When Boston or Cambridge gets a little strip of park green space, they somehow tend to end up with a freeway of angry cars right up alongside it.)

The advantage of the soft slope is that it can be used with a wheelchair.

Edit: …and of course bikes etc

Bikes can do pretty extreme climbs without much issues. And probably would hate that tight u-turn.

Young kids also use bikes in the city.

Well, at least mine.

Mine is right across the river [1]... There are (or were) old 1930s stairs from the deck of the BU bridge across the river to ... nothing. Access to the pedestrian path on the south side of the river requires backtracking a quarter mile to a pedestrian bridge.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fenway%E2%80%93Kenmore,+Bo...

Author of the original article here. I actually remember that bridge! It's such a huge mass of concrete. For me it is memorable because it's right next to the only Microcenter in Cambridge. If I wanted to buy a Raspberry Pi while in law school (more common of an occurrence than I care to admit), that's where I'd go.

City planners in Warsaw, Poland have apparently noticed that underground passages are actually an inconvenience to pedestrians and now I'm seeing a trend where such crossings are starting to get surface-level crosswalks as well, such as at Rondo Dmowskiego[0], a principal public transport hub. Such changes are a life quality improvement to people with disabilities - elevators are breaking left and right, cutting off people who rely on them. Right now I live in Berlin and the public transport notification page is always filled with reports of broken elevators all around the city.

[0] https://www.transport-publiczny.pl/img/20210430130147Dmowsk2...

Ugh, there is so much to be angry about when it comes to Boston area parkways. First and foremost, they are maintained by the MA Dept of Conservation and Recreation under the guise that their purpose is to provide access to the river parks (rather than their real puprose, providing drivers access to downtown Boston/Cambridge). And among MA agencies, DCR is paradoxically backwards when it comes to providing bike- and ped-friendly improvements. The DOTs of MA, Boston and Cambridge are somehow way more progressive when it comes to these things. Just compare the Somerville/Cambridge community paths and new Boston core cycletracks with the stupid little "bike paths" on either side of the Charles.

My favorite un-fun fact was that James Storrow was an ardent advocate for the public parkland along the river, and opposed building a highway on the land. After his death, MA thanked him for his service by... building a highway through the park and naming it Storrow Drive.

I don't know this area, so I don't know how good it is there, but these are pretty nice if you're cycling. I imagine if one's in a (motorized) wheelchair it's a fair option as well. But it sure seems like there should also be a set of steps cutting off much of the distance for those who can/want to use steps instead. Maybe even with a bike gutter along the steps like so many transit systems have in their stations.

Any ramp style bridges that are U shaped annoy me. I much prefer ramp style bridges that are H or Z shaped so you can make productive walking in your goal direction for both the up and down legs of the trip.

That bridge also took over 2 years to complete at an absurd cost after the one it replaced was damaged. While it was under construction, there was a temporary red light installed at the intersection of Magazine St. which was far better all around as it allowed pedestrians to just cross the street much closer to the only real stores in the immediate area (and a Starbucks, now closed.)

While the bridge is well-built and provides wheelchair and bike access, its location is inconvenient. It’s so far away from any of the few available amenities that many people just try to dart across the road from the park and community pool. Two people have been struck in killed trying to cross in the past few years.

Other than a single water bubbler at the BU boathouse, that only went in a couple of years ago, there isn’t a single place to get a drink (let alone buy one or get a snack) the entire 4+ mile length of the river in Cambridge from the Museum of Science to the Elliot St. Bridge, without crossing Memorial Drive. It’s unclear to me why they just don’t take down the footbridge and make the stop light with crosswalk permanent. There seems to be some issue with the fact that Cambridge itself doesn’t really have control over the road itself or the land along the River as it’s controlled by the Department of Conservation & Recreation (the “dcr”) which is a State agency.

The footbridge that I find oddest is the one across Rt. 2 past Alewife just over the Cambridge line in Arlington.

https://goo.gl/maps/8JrUQHn2j4B7TuE56

    42.399443, -71.147645
    Arlington, Massachusetts

I assume it has a similar story to the OP in that whatever utility it may have had has long since passed.

I've seen people dart across a road to avoid using a much straighter pedestrian bridge. They just didn't want to have to walk up and down steps.

Not sure you can fix that issue with better design.

Of course you can. Just design the area for walking and biking and let the motor vehicle traffic flow around that.

A car driver is not nearly as inconvenienced by an incline as a pedestrian or cyclist would be. If we don't want to do more in depth changes, then at least we could just let motor vehicle traffic tunnel under or bridge over foot and bicycle paths instead of the other way around.

Tunnels and bridges are expensive. If there's a choice between a pedestrian bridge and a car bridge, the pedestrian bridge will be less expensive. And vastly more people drive than walk. It's pretty obvious how we end up with the infrasructure we have.

> And vastly more people drive than walk. It's pretty obvious how we end up with the infrasructure we have.

Cars made long distances easy to reach and shaped cities.

Let's reshape cities to reduce dependency to cars and to gas.

According to this reddit comment[1] that I didn't dive farther into, the Rt. 2 bridge used to allow access from a westbound bus stop before Alewife station was built. Makes reference to the now closed Lanes & Games. Looking at MBTA bus maps I don't see any stop there now but I could be wrong.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/2ny6b5/whats_up_wit...

Seems that this is some sort of accessibility design. It really should combine both stairs and ramp. But that might have cost bit more...

Ha! I moved out of Cambridge in 2011 to CA and as soon as I read "Memorial Drive, Cambridge" I immediately thought "that's going to be the one by Microcenter." Thanks for posting, brought back some memories :)

That bridge is clearly designed in that way to comply with the ADA.

Injecting my personal politics: I've always thought the ADA was a somewhat misguided initiative when it comes to wheelchair accessibility. Seems like if we had taken all the money we spent trying to make places accessible by wheelchair and had instead directed it towards R&D for better modes of assistance for the disabled, we might've solved the problem instead of just slapping a bandaid on it.

Plus we wouldn't have bridges like this, which are worse for the non-disabled.

What if the ADA was instead called the “Baby Stroller Accessibility Act”? Or the “Elderly Accessibility Act”?

Or do you want to slap on a remote-controlled exoskeleton on a toddler?

The elderly who need a wheelchair I think can be lumped in with the "disabilities" crowd already, not really a separate category.

Caregivers carrying children too small to walk seems like a better solution than ensuring all bridges have ramps, but that's just my opinion.

You're obviously not a caregiver who has to carry both the child(ren) and the stroller in the stairs.

I've done that a lot actually? Regardless, I don't think our society should be specifically structured around certain use-cases, and I think it is wildly impractical to try to cater to all of them in all scenarios.

This bridge has elements that make me think it's beyond ADA. The bridge could have been closer to the intersection. It could have both stairs and a ramp.

That design is insane. Maybe the designer had friends in the concrete business.

I have to admit, even though I loved this, something about it made me sad. It feels a bit like the freeway eventually did end up decimating a neighborhood as it was (Bloomfield), to the point it's a historical mystery.

There's a bridge near me that's somewhat similar in that it seems disused a bit, although it connects two residential neighborhoods. It never occurred to me it might be there because of the school right next to it.

Bussing has done more to make these bridges unused than much of anything else. Kids walking to school is now relatively rare.

My county's schools actually forbid kids from walking to school. Must be dropped off/picked up, in a car, by a parent. Ugghghgh

Why?!

This feels like the sort of single issue platforn that could get you and some friends elected to the county council.

People in the late 80's and early 90's became paranoid about child safety, even as society was getting safer for children, because of largely made-up paranoia like child predators lurking in neighborhoods.

Many places these days are so paranoid that people will call police if children are out playing in a neighborhood unattended. Totally unlike the 80's. Others are trying (and sometimes succeeding) to pass laws specifically clarifying that it's legal to let kids roam neighborhoods. I don't know who I'm following on Twitter who mentioned this, but some place just passed such a law. There's been a "rewilding" movement for some time now, and people like Haidt are emphasizing how terrible it is for psychosocial development for kids not to be out with other kids socializing without direct parental oversight.

I agree with you broadly, but it is perhaps possible that increasing paranoia was causally related to reduced numbers of dead or missing children. I could not quickly find statistics about this, but it would be interesting to see a study.

Ick. As a six-year-old I was allowed to walk to school because the eight-year-olds would walk with me and make sure I was safe.

No wonder why US has such an obesity problem.

There is something Robert Caro-esque about this article, if you made Caro an internet virtuoso and his footnotes hilarious (maybe they are! I haven't checked). So it's satisfying to see how it ends at the shore of Caro's great theme: power. Particularly public power, particularly to build things like interstates and bridges. It's an endlessly well-researched case study, which has been Caro's method too, right up to all the archives and long distance travel. But Caro spent a decade on one and 5 decades on the next, which makes this author's 2 months seem...risky!

If anyone will appreciate this, Hacker News will: this page is un-monetized, has no ads, no cookies, no Google Trackers, and loads no external scripts. You can check! I (the author) don't even know how many people are on the page (except that it is a lot because it's linked here).

The images do load from a different domain (tylervigentest.com), but that is for a different reason. I was overwhelming my webhost with more DNS requests than it could handle.[0] I went to move my domain, but it got locked in the process (I don't know why). Offloading the images was the only way I could think to reduce the strain on the current DNS server.

[0]See, for example, the comments section of the submission here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37318295

I think it's worth tracking how many people view a thing at least just to have a reasonable idea so things like "how many DNS requests should I be able to handle" are less of a shot in the dark.

But it was nice to read something with no distracting ads, or complicated popups asking my consent for a range of mysterious cookies.

I was also very much liked your inline notes system! I avoided the early notes as I'm so used to them either taking me to a new site or scrolling me to the bottom of a page and losing my place. Your inline notes were almost perfect, letting me read only extras I wanted, without losing the main thread, brilliant!

Have you explored the possibility of sticking a new plaque on it calling it Bloomfield bridge?

I mean, fair. But traffic on my site tends to be extremely spikey like this (whenever the Spurious Correlations page gets posted somewhere), so I am not sure I would ever get an accurate baseline. I don't mind paying a little extra for something that works.

Also the reason I don't track pageviews is psychological: because the metric cannot impact me in any way, I avoid it so that I don't just sit around watching numbers go up.

I am glad you liked the inline notes! I explored a lot of ways to do that before I settled on them. s/o to Matt Stevans for the CSS: https://www.stevans.org/inline-footnotes/

I don't think the bridge needs another plaque. But the good news is that now if someone else is curious and searches the project number, they will find the answer!

> I think it's worth tracking how many people view a thing at least just to have a reasonable idea so things like "how many DNS requests should I be able to handle"

This can be done from web server logs and doesn't require cookies or client-side scripts.

The only issue with the notes system: I don't know how to access them for copy-paste. It would be good to also have a copy somewhere in the page.

> She described the "baby boom" more acutely than I had ever heard it described before. For her, it was a "swarm of hundreds of kids" the exact same age.

I grew up in the 80s (Gen X). We didn’t have hundreds of kids, but there were dozens of of kids in every neighborhood we lived in (we lived in Indiana, Texas, Colorado, Florida, and California). My kids have grown up mainly in the 2010s-present. There might be a single other kid the age of one of my kids in the neighborhood. There just aren’t many kids anymore. Certainly not like when I was a kid and especially not like when my parents were kids.

I think it's unfortunate and a bit annoying that people seem to have forgotten (or never learned) the meaning of the Baby Boomers label. Somehow the group called "boomers" has expanded (by some erroneous definitions) into the mid-'60s. Ridiculous.

The same thing has happened to "Millennials." Overall, any labeling after the Baby Boomers is stupid and should be avoided at all costs. If you want to talk about a particular group, simply refer to an age range. Then there's no debate.

Or even better, refer to a range of birth years. Then ten years from now, the same label still refers to the same people.

Better indeed.

Have you considered that instead the people who have kids are priced out of your area?

No, we have moved around quite a bit and find it to be the same everywhere. And anecdotally my siblings find the same thing in the states they live in.

There's a mysterious pedestrian bridge over I-5 in North Seattle, with nothing like it for miles. After reading this post I looked it up in google maps, and sure enough, it's right next to an elementary school. https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7639358,-122.3249609,554a,35... And two similar ones over I-405 https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6594203,-122.1842507,174a,35... https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6768724,-122.187362,187a,35y...

I read the whole article, it’s enthralling to me because of how heartwarming the impact was from the engineering to the users. The part about the foresight to add the little bike gutter just makes me tear up. Such a simple piece of steel, and yet it enabled so many good memories for those children writing in. I’m thankful the author didn’t get his answer from his couch either!

Me too! I would have missed out on all the fun if I had learned the answer on day one.

Amused at the disgruntled Grainger folk who don't want the bridge now - litter and foot traffic annoy them.

Very human response. But hey Grainger, the bridge was there first! You don't like it, put your business somewhere else. The bridge is for the kids, always has been, so suck it up.

I found that funny from the perspective of it invalidating the claim that the bridge was disused. It’s like a Yogi Berra adage.

How does it invalidate the claim? I don't see anything saying the bridge is used. If you mean that garbage collects, I'm assuming that to mean that wind blown trash (probably from the highway) collects and they clean it up.

To be fair, it doesn't sound like they were trying to complain about it or get rid of it. Somebody came to them for their opinion and they don't like it. There are plenty of things I'll complain about if asked that I generally suck it up and deal with.

I doubt the person complaining selected the site for the warehouse.

I think you're jumping to a few conclusions. How does foot traffic annoy them exactly? Who isn't annoyed by litter? There are no more kids. If a bridge that I and no one else uses, means that I have to pick up wind-blown litter everyday, I'd complain a bit too.

Some clarification here: when JoeAltmaier made his comment, the article contained a sentence that said, "They [Grainger] wanted the bridge torn down!"

After reading that comment and other comments like it online, I decided that it was casting the Grainger team in a worse light than I intended to, so I removed that sentence. The people at Grainger don't like the bridge, but it's not like they are out petitioning for its destruction. Even if they were, I would understand where they were coming from. My article romanticizes the bridge a bit, but it's not a particularly nice bridge to walk over today.

I got myself into a smaller version of this kind of project when I wondered about an old city building that sat in the middle of a parking lot. It took months but I discovered how to use plat maps, old records, and more that the city library had in its collection. It turned out it was part of a public bath house and pool that the city built in the early 20th century as part of a movement to ensure proper hygiene for the lower class. It was on a busy city street that got split in two when an interstate was built. Today the block the building is on is just a short dead-end street, all the activity is on the other side of the highway.

The building was sold by the city a while back and turned into apartments.

This is really a fascinating piece to read, even for a non American or not living in this area.

Also I like very much the way that it is written in a straight to the fact way despite it being very long. I did read it in one time like a book.

I wish that newspaper articles (like NYT and co) still had that quality of investigation and writing. Instead of flooding us with useless half-invented context facts to fill pages. I would subscribe more.

I'm a bit surprised that no mention was made of Tyler Vigen's other 'pet' project: Spurious Correlations, which includes the hilarious spurious correlation that the number of people who've drowned in swimming pools is positively correlated with the number of films Nicholas Cage has appeared in. :-)

Hang on. The MnDot report says "Average Daily Traffic:151,000". But. That must be the car traffic under the bridge - surely 151K people don't walk across it each day. And if so, why would you measure that? It's like measuring how much water flows under the Golden Gate bridge and ignoring how many cars go over it.

We are just so car focused it influences everything and we don't notice

Ha! Love the analogy. I agree. That statistic is totally unhelpful.

> The MnDot report...

You are looking at a report from Minnesota's DOT. Their job is to be concerned with roads and cars. Sure, our society is overly focused on cars, but you can hardly blame the DOT for putting out reports on their own subject area.

For example, the number describes how much traffic will go to alternative paths in case of some accident or planned construction work that blocks the road. Then it can be quickly deduced how far they should reroute drivers to get them use the roads that handle the additional load (instead of local streets with low limit on throughput).

No: there are 210 people/minute walking across the bridge (daylight hours only). It's amazing to see: they have to be four abreast to fit them all (two in each direction).

Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge. The author is a human bloodhound. Highest praise for the good read.

> She told me to stop looking at old documents: "no one writes down the real reason for infrastructure projects." She said I needed to look for people in power.

Wow, the whole thing was interesting, but that insight was the most interesting.

I walked on that bridge on 8/30.

That night, this article appeared in my Google feed.

Today 9/2 it's on my Hacker News feed.

Wtf?

And I drove under it yesterday! (Not so easy given I live in Seattle these days.) The world's a smaller place than we realize.

There’s a bridge near where I live, identified as “Farm Rd”. It looks like any other bridge over the interstate but I’d never heard of that road before. Generally any road around here that would warrant a bridge over the interstate is one I’d have heard of. One day I looked satellite images of it and on one end it immediately ends in a grassy field, and the other side is, unsurprisingly, what looks like a working farm.

My guess is when the interstate was built it bisected private farmland and the bridge was built so the landowner could still access the rest of their property. There’s no “going” around any other way for many miles.

I always wondered how I could find out for sure and this article gave me some ideas on how to even begin searching.

There's a curious one lane bridge[1] over I-40 outside of Raleigh that leads to a gravel road that serves about 4 houses, and then leads into the back side of Umstead State Park. We always joke about it being the "bridge to nowhere" and ponder "who had the political connections to make that happen?"

But I imagine it's something like you were saying: probably when I-40 was built, the land acquisition process resulted in those homes being cut off from everywhere else, unless that bridge was built. And probably it was cheaper / easier / more politically viable to build the bridge than buy out the remaining land-owners.

Or maybe there was more to it. This area is also adjacent to RDU airport: a lot of the land you can see near "Old Reedy Creek Road" on the map, north of I-40, belongs to the airport, even though it is undeveloped (aside from bandit MTB trails). I suppose the argument for the bridge might have involved providing better access to the airport, then or in the future, for emergency crews or something of that nature. The additional access to Umstead Park I wouldn't expect to be a big factor, because the next exit down on I-40 is already one of the two major entrances to the park.

Anyway it's always interesting to look at stuff like this and wonder how/why certain decisions were made.

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8400772,-78.7819125,75m/data...

Thanks. This article points out how fragile information is; how important a minor obsession can be; and what a great site HN is for the occasional random treasure.

A great find, OP thank you for posting. I'm in awe of the author's dedication. I wish someone close to the bridge would post a note with the URL on it.

Or a sticker with a QR code linking to the URL.

I hope a local library, government, or historical society keeps a physical printed copy on paper. Or at least an offline digital copy somewhere.

One interesting takeaway was his note about influence at the end. Nuns and their ilk could have a tremendous impact back in the day...informally speaking. And there's no documentation.

Influence != authority. But with authority alone you can't necessarily answer "why here instead of there?"

> The best search terms were not road names, they were people's names.

Demonstrating once again that it's not what you know, it's who you know.

I would have guessed the bridge was built for future development, which then wasn't done. In Vienna there is a bridge that's a bit similar that for a long time was just leading to an empty field. It goes across Grenzackerstraße, which could be rathly translated to field border street. It took some time for housed to be built on the other side. There would have been the possibility that there would be just industry on both sides and then it would have been mostly useless.

Almost every household in our neighborhood was headed by a veteran of WWII who was, indeed, white and essentially the same age. The GI bill enabled them to buy homes with minimal down-payments and Richfield was a hot spot for contractors who built dozens of houses at a time using only a few different floor plans. It is interesting now to pass by and notice how each seems to be unique--people have remodeled so much over time that only a few are obviously "original." And she is certainly correct in her reference to the baby boom; most families had at least 4 children, if not more.

This reality powerfully shaped our housing policies, financing infrastructure, etc. at the time. We live in the shadow of this history and most people seem to be largely oblivious to that fact, which mystifies me.

Great read. I love the obsession and I will now look out for things in the urban landscape that seem a bit unusual!

I can't believe I read this entire article. The topic matter was utterly banal but... I was completely enthralled!

Your writing (particularly the hidden notes) is fantastic. Loved it!

This was quite the random article to stumble upon on a Sunday morning. I’ve always wondered about this bridge, it’s in a very inhospitable zone for pedestrians. Thanks!

truly awesome research! love the portrait of the time the bridge was built, of a vibrant community of families all the same age, about be be split in two by 200 yards of pavement.

> "If you require written records before you write about women in history, you'll find yourself writing about women in history far less often than they were involved in making it."

I've started reading Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, he talks about being apprenticed to "the cutler's trade". That sound like cutlery, as in eating utensils (knives, forks, spoons). I looked it up anyway, people in the cutler's trade made and sharpened scissors and knives. I would not have guessed scissors from the name. This isn't directly related, just an example of how words change meaning over time; the same way a building piece of land can change use over time.

I read a bit of 'The Analects' (aka Selected Sayings of Confucius). It is amazing to me how much space is given to filial piety - respect for one's father.

More recently, there has been significant commentary of female characters in Tolkien's writings, following the Peter Jackson movies and the recent TV show. Where did the Entwives go after all?

Here is a similar exploration in South Carolina. There is a fairly remote pedestrian bridge in Ridgeland, SC

* https://www.google.com/maps/@32.4592184,-80.9837102,343m/dat...

which I noticed while on an east coast trip. And here is a look, sort of, into why it's there:

* https://www.greetingsfromthepast.com/2019/05/juanita-m-white...

It wasn't looking great in 2021:

* https://www.blufftontoday.com/story/news/2021/01/12/cleanup-...

It does connect two neighborhoods but doesn't seem to create access to a school or anything.

I really enjoyed this write up . Reminds me of projects in NYC like Urban Archive [0], at a microscopic level

I really wish this kind of snooping was incentivized more. It’s a great way to engage your community. Something I think many younger people, and especially those working remotely, can miss. (Myself included). Asking specifically “why” something exists is a great heuristic.

Side note—-if you’re ever traveling in Europe, try to find a Henry Holt Walks Series book for whatever city you’re in. They’re older (usually late 90s to early 00s), but they go into meticulous historical and narrative detail of overlooked sections/buildings/plaques/etc of otherwise very touristic cities. Will undoubtedly send you into a deep and labyrinthine rabbit hole

[0] https://www.urbanarchive.nyc/

I wonder how many "Bloomfield Bridges" there are in the world. I saw this headline and wondered if it was about the Bloomfield Bridge in Pittsburgh, PA. I clicked on the article and saw the pedestrian bridge, which looks extremely similar to a pedestrian bridge that ends right by the Bloomfield Bridge in Pittsburgh, but clearly just happenstance

I was expecting it to be about that one also. Gold Way / Melwood Ave (that goes under the bridge) is a magical spot in Pittsburgh.

Kind of the opposite situation but the article reminded me of the church that could be accessed from the shoulder of the PA Turnpike (until this past year it sounds like).

https://scottbeveridge.blogspot.com/2008/09/church-of-turnpi...

http://www.gribblenation.com/breezewood/church.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Baltimore,_Pennsylvania#Ch...

And from the second article, what you saw from the turnpike:

http://www.gribblenation.com/breezewood/church1.jpg

That was a fantastic article and some amazing sleuthing! Thank you for tracking it down. A quarter of the way into the article I needed to know why that bridge was there, and I’ve never been to Minnesota and have no relatives there :-)

Anyway, your solution to the mystery was very insightful and probably applies to many domains of inquiry.

Enjoyed the story and it reminded me of another bridge over I-225 that I wondered about and drive under occasionally in the Denver area. The bridge is much wider than a typical pedestrian bridge and there is really "nothing" on either side. I don't know if it's true, but the story I eventually found is that when I-225 was being built in the 70's it cut a farmer's field in half so he got a personal bridge that he could drive across in his tractor! Of course now, the farmer and his fields are long gone. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.6415158,-104.8783965,87a,35y...

This has got me inspired again about my own history project. It is so easy nowadays to go back to original sources and unearth these hidden or forgotten narratives... and then return to tell these stories in a way that gives another point of view on our current day. Thankyou to the author of this article!

Glad you enjoyed it, and good luck with your project!

If you end up finding something interesting I hope you'll write about it and post it here!

Weird they don't have a proper sidewalk and just end it on grass.

The cities would have been responsible for building sidewalks to the bridge. If you look around where the bridge is on modern maps you'll see that a lot of the residential area on the North side of the bridge (Richfield) just doesn't have sidewalks.

It's even weirder than that! Residents of Richfield at the time saw the lack of sidewalks as a feature, not a bug. They wanted to distinguish themselves from Minneapolis, so they protested the building of sidewalks because "how would people know we are a suburb if we have sidewalks?" (This is a real quote from a real, very politically active resident at the time. Seriously.)

Context: I wrote the article linked in the OP.

This reminds me of Outside Lies Magic[0], a somewhat odd (but cool) book, that explores stuff like this.

[0] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/ou...

Reminds me of this video about the origin of the name Tiffany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9LMr5XTgeyI

"I didn't fly across the Atlantic to... Of course I did"

Ha, then you might enjoy this anecdote: In that Tiffany video, there is a chart that appears on screen for a fraction of a second at 7:39 (the correlation "People drowning in swimming pool <> Films with Nicholas Cage"). That chart is from Spurious Correlations, and was made by the author of the bridge article.

Source: Am that author. :)

I notice that that part of the video is highlighted in "most replayed" now, possibly as a result of this discussion.

I know Grey has mentioned in the past being confused about traffic surges to his videos, so wonder if he noticed this one. But then he's also mentioned reading hacker news at times, so maybe he read this comment too.

This is cool! I've probably driven under that bridge thousands of times, and honestly I've paid more attention to the Grainger than to the bridge. Congratulations on digging into the story so doggedly.

Amazing dedication and I did read to the end.

Such a great read. I've done similar historical research and it's always so satisfying to get that final document that solves the puzzle. It's amazing what you can find online and in archives, and how helpful people are along the way.

In retrospect, it's not difficult to guess that the bridge was likely built for the school, because the school and church property is quite large, and there is a footpath on the side with the housing development. But it's always much harder to see things like that in context at the time.

There’s a particularly hilarious bridge to nowhere in St. Thomas, USVI. I think they’re around 30 years working on it.

https://stthomassource.com/content/2019/03/29/bridge-to-nowh...

Very funny article, watching him follow the rabbit hole. Glad he got to a resolution. I'm now more informed than I ever thought I could be about a bridge

We are now at a point where we build bridges to allow wildlife to cross interstates.

In France: https://voyage.aprr.fr/articles/ecoponts-au-service-du-vivan...

A whole gallery of them from around the world: https://interestingengineering.com/lists/29-of-the-most-hear...

this was a real pleasure to read. I had just made my coffee and saw the title. I liked the way that the author followed the thought process you would go through AND took the time to find the actual evidence to prove or disprove a theory. Well done! I'm sending it to my colleagues as, given our Edward Debono training, a brain refresh. Thanks so much for posting

This man has no self control. He just had to know. He had. to. know.

So many respects! You'd make an excellent bug hunter, mister.

This guy Chestertons!

I will think of this bridge as a metaphor for dead code.

This would be a fun addition to a college's History or Journalism curriculum.

Love this type of historical research article. Thank you for sharing

Nice piece of work. Congratulations!

Great stuff. Just great stuff.

This is a great example of if at first you don't succeed, try and try and try and try again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37344146

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37318295

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37317859

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312700

It kept getting flagged for no reason too.

No, it was getting killed by software, not flagged. If it has been flagged (enough to get killed), you would have seen [flagged][dead] rather than just [dead].

Ha! Author here. I actually posted it here right after I published it earlier this week. I thought it was more Hacker News material than Reddit material. But no one saw it at the time. Guess it didn't get the good numbers from the algorithm.

For the record: none of the other repostings of it were from me.

I know it looked like that, but it was weirder—a failure mode I ran into last night, and the process of correcting it was a rabbit hole that maybe would be interesting to share.

The article was posted 27 (!) times (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364657 - in addition to any that may have been deleted) but they were killed because the domain was banned. Yikes! how could such a great site be banned? Well, before this article existed, there was only the author's page of Spurious Correlations, which is fun and clever but not quite suitable for HN, and it was posted so often (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364947) that a mod must have banned it back when nothing else was coming in from that domain. Alas, when a ban like that fails, it can fail catastrophically, because the next thing to come in from that domain, after 85 Spurious Correlations, was this immediate classic.

I ran across all those [dead] submissions last night, realized this was an awesome article for HN and (duh) unbanned the domain. That left the problem of what to do with 27 past submissions - which should 'win'? Which user should get credit? (Eventually we want to build a karma-sharing system to solve this, but that's not done yet.)

When a good article has been submitted multiple times but not had attention yet, we often comb through the submission feeds of the accounts involved, looking for any other good-but-overlooked submissions that we might invite them to repost instead. (Edit: partly as consolation prizes, but mostly to feed more good stuff to HN readers.) That usually means looking at 2 or maybe 5 submission feeds (not 27)! but I spent about an hour last night looking through most of them and finding other articles to invite. For fun, here are the ones I found:

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37317859 (obviously)

Recursive Racks [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360186 (now reposted)

Early performance results from the prototype CHERI ARM Morello microarchitecture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082504

Show HN: Shaq, a CLI for Shazam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364124 (now reposted)

A GPT-4 capability forecasting challenge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360251 (now reposted)

A plot to steal the secret Coke can-liner formula - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37376559 (edit: now reposted)

Lego 3-axis styrofoam cutter [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37375254 (edit: now reposted)

Webb Mirror (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608752

Contexto: Guess a word based on its AI-sorted context - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33412895

The Craft of Experimental Physics (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37358468 (now reposted)

Some of those were quickly reposted (thanks all!). Invited reposts get put in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), meaning they get a random placement somewhat low on HN's front page. Most soon fall off, but the ones that spark readers' interest can go on to do well. You can see the list of invited reposts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/invited.

When deciding who to invite to repost the original thing (in this case, the bridge article), we go by a few heuristics. Earlier submitters are preferred to later ones. Submitters who have never had a story hit the frontpage are preferred to those who have; and those who haven't had a 'hit' for a long time (years, in some cases) are preferred to those who've have had one recently. Submitters who've posted less, or not for a long time, are preferred to HN titans (ColinWright, we love you but that's why https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312700 'lost', despite being early). Accounts for which we have no email address necessarily 'lose', though I sometimes try to work around that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Oh, and when one of the previous submitters is clearly the article's author, we usually don't invite them to do the repost. That way two people can have some dopamine instead of just one.

Sometimes I do this search recursively*: when in someone's past submission feed I run into an article so good I wonder who else has posted that, and which of them should 'win', so I look through all their histories for yet other articles that deserve reposting, hopefully without losing my place in the previous search. I can't handle a stack depth of more than 2 or 3 before my brain explodes and then I usually bail until next time. (* Depth-first or breadth-first? I've tried both ways to figure out which allows me to hold more state before capsizing, but I'm unsure. Both involve opening a lot of tabs, but in a different order, and both get unwieldy)

This is a great way to meander through the archives (the catacombs?) and find obscure, interesting things. It would be worth writing software to support it one of these years. HN is in a rare sweet spot where it makes sense for YC to fund it simply to be interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), and obscure overlooked submissions are among the most interesting things on HN—so the archives should only grow in value and we can hopefully keep this going a long time.

I got tired partway through last night—a recursive search with 27 inputs is too much. I can't remember why graypegg 'won'—I think I just threw an exception. That left a bunch of submitters who didn't get a repost invite, but I've added these now:

Show HN: SkyFi – Command satellites on demand - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34468803

The Curious Case of Hybrids in Watchmaking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37368929 (edit: now reposted)

The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 miles in the city - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37119695

Home Assistant Door Chime via Sonos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24740283 (the only other submission by that account! luckily it was good)

The Hunt for the Giant Squid (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37344191

If anyone else wants to dig for worthy ones, I'd love to see the links! People frequently email us asking for second chances for their own material. That's...ok I guess, but it doesn't make my eyes light up. Random finds for no other reason than just-because* are the real treasures here. (* which is also why the current article is an instant classic)

I don't want to bloat the parent comment so I'm going to macroexpand parts of it here.

[1] For the curious, here they are. Most won't be visible unless you have 'showdead' turned on in your profile:

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37355607 - Sept 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37355390 - Sept 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37354254 - Sept 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37351991 - Sept 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37349283 - Sept 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347478 - Sept 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37344146 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37343169 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37341092 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37339808 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37337460 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37337274 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37335732 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37332795 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37332357 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37330688 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37329762 - Aug 2023 (1 comment)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37323370 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37318295 - Aug 2023 (4 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37317859 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge: Why is this bridge here? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37316842 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313777 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312700 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37309738 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306042 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

Solving the Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37305110 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37301368 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

[2] Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37135725 - Aug 2023 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35033020 - March 2023 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235455 - Jan 2023 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34082009 - Dec 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33047225 - Oct 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32638195 - Aug 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32424060 - Aug 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860332 - June 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31507037 - May 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396481 - May 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30604924 - March 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30159917 - Feb 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29935495 - Jan 2022 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29414458 - Dec 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370245 - Nov 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29342268 - Nov 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29299497 - Nov 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961349 - Oct 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28825125 - Oct 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28269668 - Aug 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28259364 - Aug 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28230461 - Aug 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505912 - June 2021 (0 comments)

Random things that correlate with each other - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27420587 - June 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27086785 - May 2021 (0 comments)

A List of Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26531494 - March 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26479795 - March 2021 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24929219 - Oct 2020 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700847 - Oct 2020 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24674080 - Oct 2020 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24142621 - Aug 2020 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24040761 - Aug 2020 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22320904 - Feb 2020 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20269912 - June 2019 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19971116 - May 2019 (0 comments)

Nicolas Cage Film Appearances Associated with Pool Drownings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19433624 - March 2019 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19207507 - Feb 2019 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18914990 - Jan 2019 (0 comments)

Spurious correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18891348 - Jan 2019 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18523096 - Nov 2018 (0 comments)

Secret correlations the government wants to hide (/sarkasm off) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18416052 - Nov 2018 (0 comments)

Spurious correlations, or how cheese consumption correlates to death by sheets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17992300 - Sept 2018 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17552811 - July 2018 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16911513 - April 2018 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861919 - March 2017 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822944 - March 2017 (0 comments)

Spurious correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13379601 - Jan 2017 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374807 - Jan 2017 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13212945 - Dec 2016 (0 comments)

15 Insane Things That Correlate with Each Other - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12932331 - Nov 2016 (0 comments)

15 insane things that correlate with each other - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12874313 - Nov 2016 (0 comments)

Spurious correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12806714 - Oct 2016 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12289362 - Aug 2016 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11028637 - Feb 2016 (0 comments)

15 Things That Strangely Correlate with Eachother - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10960967 - Jan 2016 (1 comment)

Spurious correlations (Ridiculous things that inexplicably correlate) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10913561 - Jan 2016 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623264 - Nov 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10621376 - Nov 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10488448 - Nov 2015 (0 comments)

15 Insane things that correlate with each other - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10044953 - Aug 2015 (1 comment)

Spurious Correlations: “Now a ridiculous book” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9726812 - June 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9720788 - June 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations (aka correlation does not imply causation) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9711267 - June 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9698236 - June 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9607504 - May 2015 (0 comments)

US spending on science, space, and technology correlates with Suicides - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9480869 - May 2015 (3 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9187178 - March 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056358 - Feb 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017468 - Feb 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8950016 - Jan 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8847385 - Jan 2015 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088193 - July 2014 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8046149 - July 2014 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896766 - June 2014 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7778546 - May 2014 (0 comments)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7748697 - May 2014 (0 comments)

Spurious correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738836 - May 2014 (0 comments)

Per capita cheese consumption correlates with deaths by bedsheets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7737932 - May 2014 (3 comments)

Insane Things That Correlate With Each Other - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7730750 - May 2014 (0 comments)

Spurious correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7730020 - May 2014 (1 comment)

Spurious Correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7729430 - May 2014 (1 comment)

US Spending on Science Correlates with Suicides by Suffocation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728003 - May 2014 (0 comments)

Spurious correlations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726004 - May 2014 (0 comments)

Things that correlate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7721376 - May 2014 (0 comments)

Things that correlate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7716661 - May 2014 (1 comment)

Wild! Thank you for fixing it. I wonder why it was originally banned. If it’s something I can fix to avoid in the future, I’d like to address it.

I'm getting there! bear with me...

Edit: done. Sorry we banned your site (ergh) and I sure hope you write more in the future!

Edit 2: if you'll excuse the morbid aspect, your article reminded me of one I read this year about a long-unsolved murder that took place near where the author grew up, somewhere in the midwest I think. Unfortunately I can't find it right now (maybe it will ring a bell for someone) - but it was also super-well-researched (though less in a first-person voice and less cheeky), and maybe I'm wrong but I think the author has a similar sensibility to yours. We need more writing like this.

(Edit 2a: I found it: http://www.codex99.com/unclassified/patty-and-michael.html. I ran across it because of awesome things previously posted to HN from that author's site: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=codex99.com. "Along the way I’ve learned more than is probably healthy about Canadian quintuplets, murdered teenage cheerleaders, young stage actresses, middle-aged academic cartographers and elderly Victorian taxonomers." - http://codex99.com/about.html)

Edit 3: oops I didn't answer your question. I'd say the thing to fix in the future is the insufficient number of awesomely-written, intriguing articles by you. This kind of thing is so hard to come by!

Thanks dang! I appreciate your deep dig and kind words. I spend a lot of time on each project (as you saw...) so I can't promise anything soon, but happy to be unbanned.

I think I might have banned my site too if the same simple 10-year-old page was linked to 85 times, so I get it!

ha, thanks for the detailed explanation. I thought it was just amusing, and I never expected to learn more about how HN works :-p

HN is far more complex than I had thought.

That meta post raises my interest almost as much as the Bloomfield bridge.

I was sort of inspired by the OP to go into a possibly-beyond-sane level of detail, on the chance that some readers might find it fun, so I'm glad you liked it.

I can't imagine how many hours he must have put into that bridge piece!

>It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?

As a dedicated pedestrian I find it baffling why you people would even be wondering about this. You have to provide ways to cross highways as pedestrian, otherwise you just cut off huge parts of land.

I generally find the American approach to road planning where you have buildings and neighborhoods that can only be accessed by vehicle startling. What are you supposed to do if you don't have a car?

Live in a city where no car is needed, I suppose.

I know it is popular to assume that americans are crazy and ignorant, but part of the puzzle is that there were plenty of other ways to cross the highway. There are two other bridges just a few hundred feet away (a foot being about one-third of a meter):

"Why would you build a pedestrian bridge to an empty field?! That makes even less sense. Yes there is a neighborhood south of the field, but if you are in that neighborhood surely you could just use the sidewalk on one of those other two bridges a few hundred feet to the east or west."

... Have you ever walked over a freeway on the "sidewalk" that's provided? I actually found that part of the quote amusing/revealing. As a frequent pedestrian who didn't own a car for many years, but yet navigated many a suburban area, I would vastly prefer the independent footbridge over a narrow 5' wide strip while 4,000 lb boxes whipped past me at 50mph.

I've done it, and I can tell you besides being a hair-raising experience, one of the few thoughts that goes through your head in that moment is "I am meant to be less than those people in the cars in every way"

> "I know it is popular to assume that americans are crazy and ignorant"

On the contrary, I don't think this infrastructure is crazy or ignorant at all, but it is pretty emblematic of the way America defines class. Pedestrians/people who don't own cars are nearly subhuman, barely given any consideration at all in the best cases, and actively campaigned against at worst.

The way the road infrastructure is for pedestrians isn't crazy, it's entirely rational under a value system where they have no value.

"it's not walkable, so let's not build any walking infrastructure"

is there anything more perfectly self-defeating?

I agree with your point.

And this bridge was built a long time ago when prices were different - but a bridge like that would probably costs >$1M today.

If you're trying to improve the walkability of an area - building a pedestrian bridge over a highway that hardly any pedestrian will ever use is probably not the best use of funding.

Millions for cars but not one cent for pedestrians. Nice.

It's about allocating funds. If you have $1M to spend for pedestrians. You should use that on things pedestrians will use. Not on a pedestrian bridge no one will use.

People did and apparently do use the bridge. Lots of them, according to the article.

In any event, the bridge was a mitigation of the degredation of a walkable neighborhood that the Federal government was lavishly funding. People wouldn't use the bridge if the Federal highway didn't exist, so ... the result of your logic is build neither? Of course not, you prefer people to be in their cars, probably electric ones, failing entirely to see failed mitigation after failed mitigation of the original misstep which was to build the highway in the first place.

Don’t want cars someplace? Don’t build roads there.

Don’t want pedestrians somewhere? Don’t build sidewalks and footpaths there.

The way infrastructure is designed has tremendous implications on demand of modes of transportation. Of course nobody will walk anywhere if it’s unreasonable to walk anywhere.

The problem is walkability is so bad people don’t even stop to think if they need to take a car. The just do and drive 800 ft down the road to visit neighbors. Insane.

> but a bridge like that would probably costs >$1M today.

For comparison, from a brief search for “cost per mile of road”.

* $2-3 million per mile of two-lane rural road.

* $4 million per mile to expand a highway from four lanes to six lanes.

* $120k/mile/year in road maintenance.

Author here. That is definitely not what I meant to imply at all! I'm sorry if you interpreted it that way.

I love walkability and am an advocate of pedestrian and bike-centric city planning. I wrote that sentence to indicate that the bridge was especially surprising to me given the context of the lack of walkability nearby. i.e., "Why make THIS SPECIFIC PLACE walkable if nothing else around here is?"

It was clear… truly it was. There are some pretty grumpy and unnecessarily dismissive readings of your delightful quest here in this forum.

Don’t worry, for some reason there is a tiny contingent of people who just HAVE to let you know that they, in fact, know more than you because only THEY know that cars are bad for the environment.

I'm about as strident an advocate for better walkability in America as you'll find, but this is still a silly post. The OP is not about the question of why one would build pedestrian bridges in general, but why this particular one exists in this particular spot, when it is clearly of no value to anyone and has no obvious rhyme or reason to its positioning, having no connection to any other pedestrian infrastructure. Which you know perfectly well if you read any of the post.

As far as your latter paragraph goes... Read any other comment thread vaguely related to this topic, I suppose. That exact conversation is had on this site at least weekly.

The post buried the lede that the pedestrian bridge was at the end of a long avenue that was cut off by an Interstate. It continued the avenue for pedestrians.

While I enjoyed the shoe-leather reflected by the piece, I disagree with the central assumption that reconnecting neighborhood roads cut by Interstates should be an exception rather than a rule. In my city several areas are oddly isolated from one another due to highways that were a cohesive community fabric before. It's always an insult to the local neighborhood to seal places off and I'm saddened conventional wisdom today would require a special exception to heal the cut.

To plow an interstate through a city, first seize some land through imminent domain. Better to seize it from the poor because they can't afford any legal struggle.

This effectively splits poor neighborhoods.

And that can be used as a tool to move or remove those populations.

Combine this with redlining for extra "fun" for anybody black.

https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...

> And that was by design, she noted. Policymakers and planners saw highway construction as a convenient way to raze neighborhoods considered undesirable or blighted.

With absolutely no citation, quote, or reference, these types of statements are pure propaganda.

That propaganda is found right at the top of this piece, so we can know exactly what to expect from that supposed journalist.

Garbage. No facts, just hate.

It's entirely true and if you go back and read old meeting minutes they will constantly just say they're doing something just to get rid of the black neighborhood.

I'm sorry to inform you that Americans before 1960 were sometimes racist.

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...

Generally speaking other countries don't drive highways through the middle of cities nearly as much. It's still happening here - in Seattle and Bakersfield - maybe not for that reason, but still not for a good one, only because we've set a metric that cars need to go as fast as possible and when they don't the solution is more lanes.

>I disagree with the central assumption that reconnecting neighborhood roads cut by Interstates should be an exception rather than a rule.

Author here: That was not meant to be my central assumption! Sorry if it came across that way. I only called it out to note that the lack of walkability in the area made this bridge stand out. I wish that area (and other areas in my community) were more walkable and bike-friendly.

I only called it out to note that the lack of walkability in the area made this bridge stand out.

As someone who thoroughly enjoyed the piece, this smells like ignoring the obvious answer to the question. The place lacks it. The bridge provides more of it. Mystery solved, no? Need meets provision!

I felt the same way when I read about the Grainger employees complaining about the litter — which is a clue, evidence of people walking there — but you didn't follow that thread.

If you were assuming the bridge was to provide walkability then the next question would be “why connect these two points instead of somewhere more populous?”

That would lead you right down the same search as the author.

You're in luck. There are about a billion instances of "why isn't my urban planning optimal?" out there for you to dig into.

Well, yes, the specific question is not exactly useful to the vast majority of the people of the world, but I think that's a particularly harsh criteria.

And, I think that's not really the point of the article. The most useful thing came at the turning point, the advice that allowed the solution to be found - "...stop looking at old documents: 'no one writes down the real reason for infrastructure projects.' She said I needed to look for people in power."

I think that's pretty good advice, and has obvious extensions that makes it pretty useful.

The article states litter collects on the end of the bridge. So someone is using it!

You find many of these structures where freeways were cut through in the 60s and 70s because cutting walkability was considered a serious issue.

Even if only used ten times a day that’s still 3,650 trips a year.

Things like this bridge should be encouraged! Cars can drive around “the long way” - but pedestrians sent more than a hundred yards out of their way are seriously discouraged.

> article states litter collects on the end of the bridge. So someone is using it!

Or litter that would blow onto the interstate if a bit further away instead gets stuck as it can't climb stairs.

Didn't read the article, eh?

Oh I agree! I didn't spell it out in the article (I am the author), but I am a huge advocate of walkability. But if you gave me $1M and asked me to make this area more walkable, I still wouldn't build a bridge there. It's just so terribly unwalkable that that project would not even make my list. I would start with some sidewalks to get folks off the roads.

Funny story: the original residents of Richfield push back against building sidewalks, because they thought NOT having sidewalks would make them more distinguishable from Minneapolis as a suburb. That is bonkers to me.

Typical 1950's thinking. Like mass transit, sidewalks are for poor people who can't afford a car. It's an early form of transhumanism. Car + Driver, Man + Machine.

> As a dedicated pedestrian I find it baffling why you people would even be wondering about this.

Full agree, so the stance of the Grainger guys made me chuckle: We hate this bridge, cos we hate Taco Bell and it accumulates litter. (:

This pedestrian bridge is 2 blocks east of the Nicollet Ave bridge over 494 and about 5 blocks west of the Portland Ave bridge over 494. Both Nicollet and Portland Ave have sidewalks on both sides of the bridge. The bridges are old and not particularly pedestrian friendly, but pedestrians do use them, I’ve walked across the Portland Ave bridge a few times and didn’t find it dangerous or scary.

Anyways, this section of 494 is being reconstructed over the next few years, I’m curious whether the pedestrian bridge will survive or not.

Here is the physical location: https://maps.app.goo.gl/TXfx7smGDDym3V46A?g_st=ic

Well I suspect it is now the most famous pedestrian bridge in all of Minnesota, so it would be a shame if it didn't!

The first part of this comment could only be made by someone who did not read the whole article.

Tyler was not saying there was no point to having that bridge. He was saying given how other bridges were placed according to important landmarks, he did not understand why this one was placed in this location seemingly without any important landmarks.

You can believe more bridges should exist without needing some sort of important landmark and believe that it is strange this bridge was placed in this location without an important landmark given the other bridges were placed in locations with important landmarks. These two things are not mutually exclusive.

Of course it turned out that there was an important landmark (the school/church!) but that was Tyler's thought process.

Can you please review the site guidelines and stay within them more carefully? You broke several here, including:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

> not really the kind of place you would need to walk to

As an European, the amount of cringe on reading this sentence went through the roof.

Fellow European here, and also an OpenStreetMap editor who maps a lot of warehouses like what the article describes is presently at one end of the bridge and “not really the kind of place you would need to walk to”. Even in a European context, I wouldn’t consider consider that Grainiger facility any significant destination for people on foot.

Plenty of places in Europe are not in places that you "would need to walk to."

And yet, walk to them you still can

You can walk to the same sorts of places in American cities too...

Worst experience was at Stansted airport. We had a very early flight home so we decided we can drop off our car at the airport in the evening and stay at the Holiday Inn Express (worst hotel experience ever, but that's another story) ~500m away from the car rentals. There is no footpath at all. You would have to frogger over the airport access road after walking on the curb. So we had to take the bus from the rental yard back to the terminal and pay 5 pound each for the transfer bus to the hotel.

I agree that walkability and the culture around cars and walking is abysmal in the United States.

However, I should clarify that this particular location is primarily a warehouse for industrial equipment for use at the airport. Most of its business is from trucks that use the dock. It would be great if the area was more walkable, but if we made it more walkable we would not prioritize this specific business.

(Context: I am the author of the article.)

Please don't break the site guidelines, which include:

"Don't be snarky."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a sad state of affairs when somebody feels compelled to do this much work to determine why a pedestrian bridge (that connects two neighborhoods) needs to exist.

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