Author here. That is definitely not what I meant to imply at all! I'm sorry if you interpreted it that way.
I love walkability and am an advocate of pedestrian and bike-centric city planning. I wrote that sentence to indicate that the bridge was especially surprising to me given the context of the lack of walkability nearby. i.e., "Why make THIS SPECIFIC PLACE walkable if nothing else around here is?"
Don’t worry, for some reason there is a tiny contingent of people who just HAVE to let you know that they, in fact, know more than you because only THEY know that cars are bad for the environment.
And this bridge was built a long time ago when prices were different - but a bridge like that would probably costs >$1M today.
If you're trying to improve the walkability of an area - building a pedestrian bridge over a highway that hardly any pedestrian will ever use is probably not the best use of funding.
Don’t want pedestrians somewhere? Don’t build sidewalks and footpaths there.
The way infrastructure is designed has tremendous implications on demand of modes of transportation. Of course nobody will walk anywhere if it’s unreasonable to walk anywhere.
The problem is walkability is so bad people don’t even stop to think if they need to take a car. The just do and drive 800 ft down the road to visit neighbors. Insane.
It's about allocating funds. If you have $1M to spend for pedestrians. You should use that on things pedestrians will use. Not on a pedestrian bridge no one will use.
People did and apparently do use the bridge. Lots of them, according to the article.
In any event, the bridge was a mitigation of the degredation of a walkable neighborhood that the Federal government was lavishly funding. People wouldn't use the bridge if the Federal highway didn't exist, so ... the result of your logic is build neither? Of course not, you prefer people to be in their cars, probably electric ones, failing entirely to see failed mitigation after failed mitigation of the original misstep which was to build the highway in the first place.
"it's not walkable, so let's not build any walking infrastructure"
is there anything more perfectly self-defeating?