It occurred to me recently that the Solway Street Bridge across Gardiners Creek in Ashburton has been closed for an awfully long time. Bicycle Victoria noted in April last year:
The Solway Street Pedestrian Bridge (Melway 69 B1) has been assessed as potentially unsafe following erosion of the northern-creek embankment during recent storms.
So the bridge was closed—fair enough.
Both Boroondara and Stonnington Councils have been planning to replace this pedestrian bridge and have allocated funding for a new bridge to be built 10m upstream of the existing bridge. Unfortunately, the current bridge has deteriorated at a rapid rate. Work on the new bridge is expected to commence and finish in the second half of 2006.
[Emphasis added]
Now eight months later and beyond the 2006 start/finish date the bridge remains closed. Work on the replacement has not commenced and my information (via Stonnington Council) is that the new bridge was deemed "not an economically viable solution". So the existing bridge will be "stablised", with this work scheduled to commence in March.
Well, maybe. But a year does seem a long time to leave a bridge closed in order to carry out a patch-up job, especially when it connects two rather busy bike paths in the Gardiners Creek and the Anniversary Trails…
This sort of thing is exactly the reason I refrain from relying on bike paths.
I think it'll probably get a repaired, eventually. It doesn't reflect well on either council to leave a piece of their infrastructure (even one as minor as the Solway St Bridge) closed and unusable indefinitely. So next election year…
Well worth a look now (Feb 2011)after nature has reconfigured it.
We can expect it to be closed again for several years while the Councils try to think of a plan to outdo their previous achievement!
I think only one bridge ended up in the creek after the storm and you guesssed it - it was the one recently "made safe" at great expense (and inconvenience to pedestrians and cyclists)
Yes, I've posted some photos on that. I think we can safely expect a new bridge to be opened there sometime in 2013 or 2014.
Comments
I suspect that it will never get fixed - there's a way around the problem bridge that's less than 1km, and a lot of the locals know that you can usually cut across the creek about 400m up stream (unless its been raining a lot) across a concrete weird, so less pressure there too.