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The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
- UberFly 3y agoIndiana Jones and the Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge. The author is a human bloodhound. Highest praise for the good read.
- hum3hum3 3y agoAmazing dedication and I did read to the end.
- quickthrower2 3y agoGreat read. I love the obsession and I will now look out for things in the urban landscape that seem a bit unusual!
- smitty1e 3y agoThanks. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ginko 3y ago>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?
- f1shy 3y agoLive in a city where no car is needed, I suppose.
- BlandDuck 3y agoI 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."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- potatolicious 3y ago... 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.
- _dain_ 3y ago+1 "it's not walkable, so let's not build any walking infrastructure" is there anything more perfectly self-defeating?
- sscarduzio 3y ago> 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.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoFellow 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.
- keiferski 3y agoPlenty of places in Europe are not in places that you "would need to walk to."
- dingus9001 3y agoAnd yet, walk to them you still can
- keiferski 3y agoYou can walk to the same sorts of places in American cities too...
- omnibrain 3y agoWorst 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.
- tylervigen 3y agoI 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.)
- Angostura 3y agoA 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.
- UncleSlacky 3y agoOr a sticker with a QR code linking to the URL.
- nerdponx 3y agoI hope a local library, government, or historical society keeps a physical printed copy on paper. Or at least an offline digital copy somewhere.
- tetris11 3y agoFantastic 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_information_act/index.html https://www.dpma.de/english/our_office/law/freedom_of_inform...
- boomboomsubban 3y agoI 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.
- bombcar 3y agoIn 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.
- c0nsumer 3y agoI'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.)
- neilv 3y agoMy (least) favorite pedestrian bridge curiosity: https://goo.gl/maps/dJZew2G2EJJcEgvP9 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.)
- Ekaros 3y agoSeems that this is some sort of accessibility design. It really should combine both stairs and ramp. But that might have cost bit more...
- fla 3y agoThe advantage of the soft slope is that it can be used with a wheelchair. Edit: …and of course bikes etc
- unyttigfjelltol 3y agoMine 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,+Boston,+MA+02215/@42.3517167,-71.1107449,21z https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fenway%E2%80%93Kenmore,+Bo...
- whoopdedo 3y ago> 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.
- greatgib 3y agoThis 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.
- stuaxo 3y agoWeird they don't have a proper sidewalk and just end it on grass.
- scarlson 3y agoThe 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.
- tylervigen 3y agoIt'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.
- SanderNL 3y agoExceedingly 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)
- lchengify 3y agoThat 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.
- SanderNL 3y agoIf 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.
- chubot 3y agoYes 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 ...
- marstall 3y agotruly 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoThis 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/outside-lies-magic/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/ou...
- jeffrallen 3y ago> 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.
- einpoklum 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't post flamewar comments. We're trying for something else here, and we've had to ask you this more than once before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nrawe 3y agoVery 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
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoThis 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=37344146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37318295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37318295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37317859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37317859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312700
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- davikr 3y agoIt kept getting flagged for no reason too.
- dang 3y agoNo, 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].
- tylervigen 3y agoHa! 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.
- dang 3y agoI 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37317859 (obviously) Recursive Racks [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360186 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082504 Show HN: Shaq, a CLI for Shazam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364124 (now reposted) A GPT-4 capability forecasting challenge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360251 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37376559 (edit: now reposted) Lego 3-axis styrofoam cutter [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37375254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37375254 (edit: now reposted) Webb Mirror (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608752 Contexto: Guess a word based on its AI-sorted context - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33412895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33412895 The Craft of Experimental Physics (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37358468 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 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 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 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&query=by%3Adang%20repost%20invite%20offtopic&sort=byDate&type=comment 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&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=yc%20business%20interests%20by:dang 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34468803 The Curious Case of Hybrids in Watchmaking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37368929 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37119695 Home Assistant Door Chime via Sonos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24740283 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 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)
- mrsofty 3y agothis 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
- sohkamyung 3y agoI'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. :-)
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoAmused 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.
- achr2 3y agoI found that funny from the perspective of it invalidating the claim that the bridge was disused. It’s like a Yogi Berra adage.
- pigbearpig 3y agoHow 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.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoTo 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.
- tedunangst 3y agoI doubt the person complaining selected the site for the warehouse.
- pigbearpig 3y agoI 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tylervigen 3y agoAuthor 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.
- bufordtwain 3y agoThat 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.
- dang 3y agoThe 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!
- woobar 3y agoFrom 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.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoHang 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
- tylervigen 3y agoHa! Love the analogy. I agree. That statistic is totally unhelpful.
- codingdave 3y ago> 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.
- local_person 3y ago[dead]
- ogurechny 3y agoFor 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).
- dtgriscom 3y agoNo: 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).
- tylervigen 3y agoIf 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37318295
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hennell 3y agoI 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?
- tylervigen 3y agoI 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/ 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!
- hindsightbias 3y agoI will think of this bridge as a metaphor for dead code.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoThis 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.
- mark-r 3y agoThis 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.
- yihanwu1024 3y agoI 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?
- exmadscientist 3y agoAnd I drove under it yesterday! (Not so easy given I live in Seattle these days.) The world's a smaller place than we realize.
- TheJoeMan 3y agoI 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!
- tylervigen 3y agoMe too! I would have missed out on all the fun if I had learned the answer on day one.
- nedt 3y agoI 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.
- colinchartier 3y agoReminds me of this video about the origin of the name Tiffany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9LMr5XTgeyI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9LMr5XTgeyI "I didn't fly across the Atlantic to... Of course I did"
- tylervigen 3y agoHa, 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. :)
- Macha 3y agoI 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.
- pix128 3y agoIt'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.
- nkrisc 3y agoThere’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.
- mindcrime 3y agoThere'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=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8400772,-78.7819125,75m/data...
- mannyv 3y agoOne 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?"
- pnw 3y agoSuch 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.
- owgevub 3y ago[flagged]
- petarb 3y agoLove this type of historical research article. Thank you for sharing
- irrational 3y ago> 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.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoI 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.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoOr even better, refer to a range of birth years. Then ten years from now, the same label still refers to the same people.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoBetter indeed.
- fireflash38 3y agoHave you considered that instead the people who have kids are priced out of your area?
- irrational 3y agoNo, 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.
- efitz 3y agoThat 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.
- sbierwagen 3y agoThere'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,35y,32.36h,44.81t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en&entry=ttu 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,35y,311.05h,59.04t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en&entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6594203,-122.1842507,174a,35... https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6768724,-122.187362,187a,35y,131.05h,63.48t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en&entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6768724,-122.187362,187a,35y...
- cutups 3y agoI 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
- joveian 3y agoI 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-turnpike.html https://scottbeveridge.blogspot.com/2008/09/church-of-turnpi... http://www.gribblenation.com/breezewood/church.html http://www.gribblenation.com/breezewood/church.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Baltimore,_Pennsylvania#Church_of_the_Turnpike 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 http://www.gribblenation.com/breezewood/church1.jpg
- dang 3y agoThere 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!
- derbOac 3y agoI 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.
- bombcar 3y agoBussing has done more to make these bridges unused than much of anything else. Kids walking to school is now relatively rare.
- blahedo 3y agoMy county's schools actually forbid kids from walking to school. Must be dropped off/picked up, in a car, by a parent. Ugghghgh
- lukewrites 3y agoWhy?! This feels like the sort of single issue platforn that could get you and some friends elected to the county council.
- harshreality 3y agoPeople 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.
- MathMonkeyMan 3y agoThis would be a fun addition to a college's History or Journalism curriculum.
- zharknado 3y agoThis guy Chestertons!
- system7rocks 3y agoGreat stuff. Just great stuff.
- vixen99 3y agoNice piece of work. Congratulations!
- DoreenMichele 3y agoAlmost 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.
- mathgenius 3y agoThis 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!
- tylervigen 3y agoGlad you enjoyed it, and good luck with your project!
- dang 3y agoIf you end up finding something interesting I hope you'll write about it and post it here!
- pbj1968 3y agoThere’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-nowhere-illustrates-v-i-s-poor-construction-management/ https://stthomassource.com/content/2019/03/29/bridge-to-nowh...
- TomMasz 3y agoI 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.
- bogrollben 3y agoI 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!
- xcskier56 3y agoThis 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!
- nedrylandJP 3y agoHere 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/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu 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-crosswalk-over-i-95-in-south-carolina/ 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-interstate-95-crosswalk-underway/6588700002/ 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.
- csours 3y ago> "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?
- rosemarywinks03 3y ago[dead]
- jbuzbee 3y agoEnjoyed 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,27.42h,70.17t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@39.6415158,-104.8783965,87a,35y...
- westernaccess 3y agoI 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/ https://www.urbanarchive.nyc/
- dolmen 3y agoWe 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-vivant https://voyage.aprr.fr/articles/ecoponts-au-service-du-vivan...
- caf 3y agoA whole gallery of them from around the world: https://interestingengineering.com/lists/29-of-the-most-heartwarming-wildlife-crossings-around-the-world https://interestingengineering.com/lists/29-of-the-most-hear...