The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge

https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge

by graypegg • 3 years ago

1028 253 3 years ago

UberFly• 3 years ago

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

hum3hum3• 3 years ago

Amazing dedication and I did read to the end.

smitty1e• 3 years ago

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.

ginko• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

BlandDuck• 3 years ago

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."

potatolicious• 3 years 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_• 3 years ago

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

is there anything more perfectly self-defeating?

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 years ago

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.

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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?"

gipp• 3 years ago

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.

unyttigfjelltol4• 3 years ago

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.

webnrrd2k• 3 years ago

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.

bombcar6• 3 years ago

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.

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

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.

dtgriscom2• 3 years ago

Didn't read the article, eh?

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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.

speed_spread• 3 years ago

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.

throwbadubadu• 3 years ago

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. (:

quickthrowman• 3 years ago

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

caf3• 3 years ago

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!

nabakin• 3 years ago

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.

dang13• 3 years ago

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.

sscarduzio• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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.

keiferski2• 3 years ago

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

dingus9001• 3 years ago

And yet, walk to them you still can

omnibrain• 3 years ago

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.

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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.)

dang13• 3 years ago

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

"Don't be snarky."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

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

Angostura• 3 years ago

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.

UncleSlacky• 3 years ago

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

nerdponx• 3 years ago

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

tetris11• 3 years ago

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...

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

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.

bombcar6• 3 years ago

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.

c0nsumer2• 3 years ago

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.)

astrange2• 3 years ago

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.

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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!

neilv• 3 years ago

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.)

fla• 3 years ago

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

Edit: …and of course bikes etc

Ekaros2• 3 years ago

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

unyttigfjelltol4• 3 years ago

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...

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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.

worklaptopacct• 3 years ago

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...

kdmccormick• 3 years ago

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.

c0nsumer2• 3 years ago

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.

Cerium• 3 years ago

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.

tosser0001• 3 years ago

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.

nitwit005• 3 years ago

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.

nedrylandJP2• 3 years ago

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...

Ekaros2• 3 years ago

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

iamhamm• 3 years ago

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 :)

fastball3• 3 years ago

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.

ciabattabread• 3 years ago

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?

pigbearpig3• 3 years ago

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.

whoopdedo• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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.

stuaxo• 3 years ago

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

scarlson• 3 years ago

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.

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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.

SanderNL2• 3 years ago

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)

lchengify• 3 years ago

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.

SanderNL2• 3 years ago

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.

chubot• 3 years ago

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 ...

marstall• 3 years ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

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...

jeffrallen• 3 years 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.

nrawe• 3 years ago

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

CrzyLngPwd2• 3 years ago

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

davikr• 3 years ago

It kept getting flagged for no reason too.

dang13• 3 years ago

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].

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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.

dang13• 3 years ago

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)

dang13• 3 years ago

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

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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.

CrzyLngPwd2• 3 years ago

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.

dolmen9• 3 years ago

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

mrsofty• 3 years ago

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

sohkamyung• 3 years ago

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. :-)

JoeAltmaier• 3 years ago

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.

achr2• 3 years ago

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

pigbearpig3• 3 years ago

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.

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

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.

tedunangst• 3 years ago

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

pigbearpig3• 3 years ago

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.

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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.

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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.

bufordtwain• 3 years ago

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.

dang13• 3 years ago

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!

iandanforth• 3 years ago

Really enjoyed the article! Your tenacity was impressive.

tiahura• 3 years ago

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.

Two9A• 3 years ago

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.

RetroTechie• 3 years ago

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.

markphip2• 3 years ago

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

Macha2• 3 years ago

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)

echelon• 3 years ago

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.)

asmithmd1• 3 years ago

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!"

qingcharles• 3 years ago

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!

bandyaboot• 3 years ago

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.

flir• 3 years ago

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.

DiabloD3• 3 years ago

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

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

Thanks! Means a lot!

justincormack• 3 years ago

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

ShadowBanThis013• 3 years ago

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

Reason0772• 3 years ago

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.

userabchn• 3 years ago

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.

kasztelan_• 3 years ago

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.

quinncom• 3 years ago

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

fortran77• 3 years ago

Sadly, Howard Kyllo passed away

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

Reason0772• 3 years ago

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!

pm215• 3 years ago

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

adolph• 3 years ago

Y’all even have bridges for boats

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

Gibbon1• 3 years ago

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.

samstave• 3 years ago

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

bombcar6• 3 years ago

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.

Fatnino• 3 years ago

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.

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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

db48x5• 3 years ago

… 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”.

avianlyric7• 3 years ago

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.

bandrami• 3 years ago

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.

xcskier562• 3 years ago

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

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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.

impetus21• 3 years ago

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.

caf3• 3 years ago

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?

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

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

lifeisstillgood• 3 years ago

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

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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

codingdave• 3 years 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.

ogurechny• 3 years ago

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).

dtgriscom2• 3 years ago

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).

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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

hennell• 3 years ago

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?

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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!

SoftTalker3• 3 years ago

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.

dolmen9• 3 years ago

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.

hindsightbias• 3 years ago

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

YeGoblynQueenne• 3 years ago

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.

mark-r• 3 years ago

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.

yihanwu1024• 3 years ago

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?

exmadscientist• 3 years ago

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.

TheJoeMan• 3 years ago

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!

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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

nedt• 3 years ago

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.

colinchartier• 3 years ago

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"

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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. :)

Macha2• 3 years ago

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.

pix128• 3 years ago

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.

nkrisc• 3 years ago

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.

mindcrime• 3 years ago

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...

mannyv• 3 years ago

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?"

pnw• 3 years ago

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.

petarb• 3 years ago

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

irrational2• 3 years 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.

ShadowBanThis013• 3 years ago

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.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

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

fireflash38• 3 years ago

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

irrational2• 3 years ago

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.

efitz• 3 years ago

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.

sbierwagen• 3 years ago

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...

cutups• 3 years ago

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

joveian2• 3 years ago

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

dang13• 3 years ago

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!

derbOac• 3 years ago

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.

bombcar6• 3 years ago

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

blahedo• 3 years ago

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

MathMonkeyMan• 3 years ago

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

zharknado• 3 years ago

This guy Chestertons!

system7rocks• 3 years ago

Great stuff. Just great stuff.

vixen99• 3 years ago

Nice piece of work. Congratulations!

DoreenMichele• 3 years ago

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.

mathgenius• 3 years ago

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!

tylervigen23• 3 years ago

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

dang13• 3 years ago

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

pbj1968• 3 years ago

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...

TomMasz• 3 years ago

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.

bogrollben• 3 years ago

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!

xcskier562• 3 years ago

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!

nedrylandJP2• 3 years ago

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.

csours• 3 years 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?

jbuzbee• 3 years ago

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...

westernaccess• 3 years ago

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/

dolmen9• 3 years ago

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...

caf3• 3 years ago

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

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge

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