Creating our ‘green golden gate’ bridge

Reader suggests a park built atop bridge to Vancouver

By William Badrick

Pamplin Media Group, Jul 8, 2010 (6 Reader comments)

COURTESY OF William Badrick

Architect says a park over the planned Columbia River Crossing would attract worldwide visitors.

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My EcoThought is to place a park atop the Columbia River Crossing bridge planned between Portland and Vancouver.

The park roof will pay for itself by replacing an expensive stormwater treatment facility. It will greatly reduce the bridge’s carbon footprint. It will create public park space for the working-class neighborhoods on both sides of the river, and will draw eco-tourists and their dollars to the Northwest.

It will be our “green golden gate” bridge.

Building a bridge in the 21st century must be done better and differently than it was done in the past. It should reflect our understanding of global warming and salmon preservation, and illustrate our best design response to difficult conditions.

The bridge must accommodate light rail, bicycle and pedestrian service to balance the car and truck capacity, but still will have a massive carbon footprint. One simple and powerful way to mitigate that is by placing a park roof on top of the bridge.

The park roof will be a tool to capture all the rainfall that would otherwise land on the road surface and mix with the oil and gas that falls from vehicles. This stormwater pollution is expensive to treat after it runs off the bridge deck into a treatment facility. By capturing the rainfall with the park roof, we can save money and save the salmon.

A pollution treatment facility for the bridge will cost in the area of $12 million to $15 million. In addition, a conventional bridge roadway must be made to slope to drains, which fill hundreds of pipes, all of them routed to the treatment plant. All of these metal drains and pipes cost money and add to the bridge’s carbon footprint.

By contrast, the park roof needs only a small-gauge recycled plastic pipe sprinkler system powered by solar panels.

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