Portland’s bridge for everything but cars

Later this year, a new bridge will span the Willamette River in Portland.

Portland, like Spokane, is a bridge city, so any new bridge is notable. This one - called the Tilikum Crossing - is especially interesting, as it allows every mode of transport to cross. Except cars.

Last month, Jonathan Maus, editor and publisher at BikePortland.org , was given a sneak peek of the bridge . The photos on his post present a Bizarro world bridge that could only exist in Portland, one of the bike-friendliest cities in the nation. Maus, a longtime bike advocate in the city, is rightfully in awe of the project’s scope, but digs into the details throughout his post :

This exciting new piece of infrastructure will grab a ton of headlines not just because it’s the first new bridge to be built across the Willamette in over 40 years — but because it’s one of the only spans in America where every mode will be allowed except for private cars.

Let that sink in: No cars or trucks means this bridge — one-third of a mile in our dense, central city transportation network — will have only a fraction of the noise, toxic pollutants, and safety hazards that private motorized vehicles plague our city with each day.

Spokane has its own, much smaller, no-car-but-also-no-light-rail-or-streetcar bridge coming to the University Distric t. It most assuredly won’t come with this traffic signal.

Or a view such as this.

Is the Tilikum Crossing the coolest bridge you’ve ever seen? Or are the Utopian dreamers of Portlandia trying to anger us?