Pedestrian bridge to nowhere.

For years there has been no safe way to cross the I-70BusinssLoop between the downtown Grand Junction core and the train station area including Catholic Outreach, and there still isn't. People dangerously jaywalk endangering themselves and other drivers.

Now the city wants to spend $3.5million on a pedestrian bridge over the railyard between the train station and the riverfront area. Oh, and they want to use imminent domain to take property from the owners of the nearby Historic Pufferbelly Union Station for the project. And to top it all off apparently CDOT has plans to widen the I-70BusinessLoop from five lanes to seven lanes between US Hwy6 (North Avenue) and Ute and Pitkin avenues.

This includes the section of 1st Street from Grand Avenue to Ute and Pitkin. Yet CDOT has no plans themselves to add crosswalks or other measures that would enable people to safely cross the highway. CDOT also has no plans to address the sharp hairpin curve on the transition from Ute Avenue onto 1st Street.

So to sum up CDOT is going to add more traffic lanes and the City is going to take someone's property and build a bridge that no one can use because no one will be able cross the busy highway to get to it. Sounds about right.

Oh, one more thing. The City is plugging this bridge project under Measure 2A, the measure you approved to provide funding to improve transportation infrastructure. This really angers me because I supported Measure 2A to fix our roads not build foot bridges to nowhere.

Don't get me wrong, pedestrian bridges can improve traffic safety and in certain instances they would qualify as transportation infrastructure - such as a footbridge over North Ave or 12st Street to access CMU, or a footbridge connecting River Road and Redlands Blvd with Patterson Road near the mall. But this is just a vanity project, not to mention that there is already a footbridge less than half a mile away connecting Riverside Parkway to downtown near the jail and no one uses it except for the homeless, which makes this project more than a little suspect.

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the bridge is really just meant to provide the homeless who live along the river with a quicker access route to downtown and the various outreach facilities in that area. I'm not saying that's the reason but it wouldn't surprise me, because unless it were to cross all the way over I-70B to the hotels and the rest of downtown it doesn't really serve any purpose.