Cable-Stayed Bridges - Pitt River Bridge (2)

My only photo of the side of the Pitt River Bridge is from the inside of a bus (with Anshel and Monique in the photo). We were returning from a tour of Staves Dam, but we were in too big a hurry to stop, and I ended up missing my flight home anyway.

I've been taking bridge photos recently with a Canon SD780 IS that fits in the palm of my hand. I used to carry an SLR camera and a tripod on my trips, but lately I've been traveling lighter. The Canon takes good photos for such a tiny camera.

I think this photo has a painterly quality due to the distortion from the bus window. We can see the grassy bridge embankment but not the Pitt River. The steel girders are haunched and framed into the towers. There's no sign of the swing bridges, which must already have been removed.

I read that the toll revenues on the Golden Ears Bridge have been disappointing (and drivers have to pay for both directions of travel). I haven't read about the toll revenue on the Pitt River Bridge or if they've even started collecting tolls as yet (perhaps toll collection is automated). Traffic looks busy though moving east from Vancouver in the afternoon.

In the Google Earth photo below, we can see construction on the Pitt River Bridge near the top of the picture, the Golden Ears Bridge on the bottom right, and the Port Mann Bridge (which we'll be visiting tomorrow) on the left. This photo gives a good sense of the many waterways that residents must cross to get around the region. By the way, a good article on the Pitt River Bridge is in Issue Number 54 (March 2009) of the excellent journal Bridge Design and Engineering.

Cable-Stayed Bridge - Pitt River Bridge (2) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Cable-Stayed Bridges - Pitt River Bridge

In contrast to the four, two legged towers on the Golden Ears Bridge are the two, three legged towers on the nearby Pitt River Bridge. There were two existing swing span bridges that were far enough apart to allow an eight lane bridge to be built between them (see Google Earth photo below). I wonder if the swing bridges were able to open and close while the new bridge was being built?

The new, three span Pitt River Bridge has one tower in the river while the other tower sits on the east bank. It has a main span length of 640 ft and back spans of 320 ft. This seems short for a cable-stayed bridge, but there were apparently enough cost savings in the design to make it worthwhile to Kiewit (the prime contractor).

In some ways, this bridge is similar to the Golden Ears Bridge. They both have steel girder superstructures that frame into the tower with a composite deck. They both are supported on pile caps in weak soil. They were both design-build projects.

We'll take another look at this interesting bridge tomorrow.

Cable-Stayed Bridges - Pitt River Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.