The Walnut St. Bridge in Harrisburg, PA: Why is the gap still there?

[ixnay]

http://photos.pennlive.com/4503/gallery/tropical_storm_agnes_then_and_/index.html#/0 inspired me to ask this.  The WSB then and now are at towards the end of the slideshow.

The WSB was lucky to survive Agnes intact (although converted from vehicular to pedestrian/bicycle afterwards [must've gotten too rickety; can someone confirm?]).  Then in a 1996 flood, part of the bridge was washed away on the Wormleysburg side and has not been replaced.  Will the gap ever be filled?  What's preventing it?

ixnay

[SteveG1988]

I think part of the problem is the collapsed pier, And that any repair would be blatantly obvious due to it being built to modern safety standards. I doubt you can get a waiver to build something to the standards of the rest of the spans. And as it is just a foot bridge...it is not exactly a high priority to replace.

[Duke87]

I don't think anything is preventing it other than that there really is no practical reason it needs to be done. Pedestrians looking to get from City Island to the west shore can just use the Market Street Bridge immediately to the south. Filling the gap in the Walnut Street Bridge, even if it didn't cost that much money... there are plenty of roads and bridges that PA could better spend that money on.

[briantroutman]

The Walnut Street Bridge was already redundant before it was closed to auto traffic in 1972. If you were headed from Harrisburg to Lemoyne or lower Camp Hill, you would have taken Market. And for upper Camp Hill, Enola, etc., you would have taken Forster/Harvey Taylor. Unless your destination was in of the few riverside blocks of Wormleysburg, all Walnut Street traffic would have ended up where the other two bridges would have taken them anyway. And in this case, what's true for cars is also true for bicyclists and pedestrians: Both bridges have wide, protected sidewalks and are open to bicycles as well.

So the only thing lacking with the absence of a western Walnut Street span is a nice, leisurely, quiet, bike/ped-only alternative–which as much as I might like to see it rebuilt (I used to bike that area regularly when I lived in Harrisburg)–is as much an unnecessary nicety as anything can be. And even if we paid the stiff price tag for that nicety, there's little to be connected to. The eastern end connects to a spectacular four-mile path through Riverfront Park–which in turn is part of the much larger twenty-mile Capital Area Greenbelt. The West Shore has no such riverfront pathway and no bike lanes or bike-friendly streets. In fact, I might even call that part of Front Street bike-hostile.

[ixnay]

Good, interesting answers.  Thanks.

I guess my concern was whether reopening the WSB wouldn't alleviate bike/passenger congestion on the Market St. bridge, say for a Senators game (I drove to a Sens game on City Island in 1995 before the WSB section washed away) or other event on City Island.

ixnay