Continuing with the bicycle news, another big ongoing project which has a lot of people excited is the new pedestrian and bicycle bridge adjacent to I-40.
Someone at BikeABQ posted this killer photo of the construction as viewed from atop the mesa above I-40. After seeing it, I decided I’d check it out for myself. Going there on a Sunday a couple weeks back, I wandered into the empty construction site and got a few shots from below the new bridge.
It’s a very beautiful bridge; slender, graceful, yet simple. Recent visits to San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and New York have revealed that I have a love of pretty bridges, so it’s nifty to get one here in Albuquerque.
Aesthetics aside, this bridge will actually serve a very useful purpose – filling in a major gap for pedestrians and bicyclists across the Rio Grande. At the moment, I-40 is the only bridge across the river which doesn’t have some kind of pedestrian/bicycle access attached, effectively stranding bicyclists in several neighborhoods in the Coors/I-40 area, which happen to be some of the densest neighborhoods in the Westside (which probably isn’t saying much, but still).
More than that, this bridge fills in a gap in the overall east-west chain of bike trails. Currently, Albuquerque has four really good north-south bike routes: a trail along Unser, the Bosque, the North Diversion Channel, and the trail along Tramway. But Albuquerque is lacking in a decent east-west route. There are a couple of good contenders, Paseo del Norte and I-40, but both have major gaps.
This bridge fills in one of the gaps in a potential I-40 trail, and it’s probably the most costly of all the remaining gaps. That new bicycle bridge near Carlisle and I-40 was another gap recently filled. There are still a few more gaps remaining: between 6th Street and University, between Carlisle and Uptown, and between Jerry Cline Park and Los Altos Golf Course. Filling these in with new trails will give us an almost uninterrupted bicycle and pedestrian corridor all the way from Unser to Tramway, connecting to the four aforementioned north-south routes and the Paseo de las Montanas trail. Now that would have quite the impact.
So here’s to our newest bridge. May it brighten the future of cycling in Albuquerque!
2 comments:
Fantastic photo, inspiring and well worth sharing!
The lack of an east-west bike path drives me crazy (in many ways ABQ is oriented east-west from nob hill / unm to downtown to old town to the west side). If the roads and bike paths were magically switched all the drivers would be like wtf is the point, there are lots of roads, but none of them connect. I can't get anywhere.
I like the blog.
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