On 3/15/2018 1:01 PM, sms wrote:

That under-crossing was especially important because there was no safe
pedestrian or bicycle crossing of the tracks for a very long way in
either direction. They built it pretty fast. If you want to take
Caltrain to the soccer stadium, it's now practical to do so. Costco is
also there though not many people in suburban areas take public transit
to Costco (disclaimer, when I was in London a few years ago I wanted to
go to Costco. It's far out in the suburbs. It took three trains and a
bus to get there https://warehouses.costco.co.uk/locations/chingford/).

FWIW, I'm definitely in favor of bike & pedestrian access crossing
barriers like railroad tracks and especially freeways.

It's very common to find neighborhoods or minor roads that were closed
off when freeways were built. In some cases, certain inner-city
neighborhoods became almost like islands, where there was no real access
out except by car. If the crossings were designed in when the freeways
were built, the cost penalty would have been a tiny part of the project
budget.

In our metro area, after a freeway river crossing was built, they
removed a bridge over the river that provided access for non-freeway
traffic: cars, bikes and pedestrians. That bridge was part of my normal
bike commute route to work. Losing it didn't bother me tremendously
because I could use another bridge (albeit a less pleasant one) maybe
half a mile upstream, and I was heading that direction anyway. It added
negligible distance.

But depending on his route, a pedestrian might have a mile added to
their trip by the loss of the old bridge. That's probably why I still
occasionally see pedestrians crossing illegally by using the freeway bridge.


--
- Frank Krygowski