The bridge that isn’t

I came across this structure one evening last week while walking along the Scott pathway. It’s a span over the transitway cut, about 80 meters from Westboro station. My first glimpse of it was from the greenery on the right side, where it can just be seen through the shrubs and weeds that crawl up the transitway’s chain link fence.

I couldn’t quite make out what I was looking at it in the twilight so I resolved to come back in the daytime to have a better look. When I did, I snapped the above photo from the bus-turnaround at Westboro station as I faced east. From this view it looked like just a single girder.

I walked around to the north — the left end of the span — and tried to hold my camera high enough above the barbed wire to capture a top view.

Turns out the structure is about 8 feet wide and has the kind of steel decking running along it that you often see on road  bridges; the decking is stepped so that the central level is a foot or two lower than the sections on the flanks.

I could see that the span crossed the transitway right under some power lines — you can just make them out at the very top of the first image —  so for awhile I thought perhaps I was looking at something designed to support a length of “backup” underground electrical cable that had poked out of one side of the transitway cutting and needed to be supported as it made its way across to pop back in the cutting wall on the other side. But of course it is an awfully robust piece of engineering to support an electrical cable, so for the moment I had to leave it as a mystery.

I happened to be having coffee the following afternoon with Eric Darwin of the Dalhousie Community Association (and the excellent West Side Action blog). Eric’s been following transitway developments for years from his Little Italy location, so I showed him the image on my camera, and he solved the mystery it for me on the spot. Turns out that in the early days of the transitway, large-volume water mains ran over the top of the cutting in several locations, and they were supported by spans like the one I had found. They were essentially aqueducts, if short ones, and there is another similar one close to Tunney’s Pasture, and several others that Eric knows about. They’ve since been rendered superfluous by improvements to Ottawa’s water and sewer network, and the big pipes on top have been removed.

The point about them is that they are bridges, be could be easily converted into pedestrian and cycle spans across the transitway. In this case of this structure, it even joins up with an an asphalted pathway that runs north alongside the Metropole development until Lanark Avenue.

Could it one day make for a feeder route into the proposed “Bikewest” cycle-way that has been picking up interest this past year?