Originally Posted by B. Carfree

We have four bike/ped bridges in town. The DeFazio bridge, over the Willamette River, is a comely suspension bridge that serves no real purpose (there is an adjacent bridge, the Ferry St. Bridge, that has bike/ped paths on both sides).

However, I suspect the one you saw is the only one that does not span the river, the Delta Hwy Bridge. It has pretty red lights, but its beauty ends there. The east end is in a neighborhood with nothing to go to and where no one who rides, which by itself doesn't condemn the bridge to uselessness. It's problem is the other end. Rather than span both the highway and its adjacent high speed frontage road, the morons who designed it chose to land it just short of this high speed roadway. Thus, any users of the bridge must stop at the bottom and wait for traffic to clear before they can proceed to the riverfront bike paths. They were 90% of the way there, but chose to screw it up. This sort of bad planning does bunch up my knickers. This poorly done bridge likely will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 per crossing over the first decade of its existence due to the low level of use.