Sellwood Bridge

Stopped at the old ferry landing to check on the progress of the Sellwood Bridge replacement project. This thing is a little nuts. The bridge is old and scored a negative value on the official bridge integrity scale, so it needed to be replaced. It's the only bridge between Ross Island (2 miles downstream) and Oregon City (8 miles upstream). It is kind of crucial, so they didn't want to just knock it down and then build a new one because it would put a real crimp in traffic for the year or however long it will take to build the new bridge. For some reason the new bridge needed to go in the same place as the old one, so they moved the old bridge over and built new temporary ramps on either end. You can see one of the concrete piers that used to hold up the old bridge is not holding up anything anymore. All the black steel girder work is temporary stuff built to hold up the old bridge and facilitate building the new one.
    Since the old bridge is only two lanes you might think that they might make the new one four lanes, but you'd be wrong. A four lane bridge could really use a four lane road connected to it, and Sellwood, you see, an established community, doesn't want some four lane freeway built through the center of their town.
    This bridge was built at the same time, and under the same bond measure as the Burnside bridge. The Burnside bridge is a six lane draw bridge in downtown Portland and it got the lion's share of the bond money. The Sellwood bridge was built with what money was left over.