urbanSTL

Nice picture of the lighted bridge from The Count's site.



Who paid for the lighting, and could they do the same for Eads and PSB? We used to hear that the lighting on Eads and PSB made barge river navigation dangerous. But today we have cars that drive themselves. I would hope that the barge industry today has GPS and digital TVs tied to computers, like my very affordable Subaru does, that would allow a tow pilot to drive between the bridge supports with his eyes closed.

^I'm pretty sure that's a rendering and not a photograph. That image has been kicking around for a while (i.e. before the span was even finished). So, I think the lighting of the bridge is still TBD.

Yeah that looks like a rendering. I've only seen the west tower lit up so far.

^^ I have seen both side lit at same time before, although most of the time it seems to alternate. Def helps with the downtown look IMO

gary kreie wrote: Who paid for the lighting, and could they do the same for Eads and PSB? We used to hear that the lighting on Eads and PSB made barge river navigation dangerous. But today we have cars that drive themselves. I would hope that the barge industry today has GPS and digital TVs tied to computers, like my very affordable Subaru does, that would allow a tow pilot to drive between the bridge supports with his eyes closed.

The City and Ameren paid for the lighting or atleast they paid the 20% to match 80% of some fed grant

How much would it cost to light the Eads Bridge and the PSB? I tried to find how much the VP organization paid in the 1980s (1981?) but couldn't seem to find it anywhere.

I wonder if a corporate sponsor would be willing to foot the bill for some sort of signage or promotional consideration: Energizer and Emerson come to mind.

Can LED lighting be all that expensive, particularly if powered by solar collectors?

http://www.emberled.com/bridge-lighting.html

I still think I'm the only St. Louisan that finds it disgraceful that you can come across the river at midnight to a super dark gateway arch. If anything needs solar lighting its the symbol of our city. I can only imagine any other city would have it lit up like a Christmas tree. Could you imagine if the Gateway Arch was in Dallas, Los Angeles, or Atlanta? Even similar sized cities like Denver, Minneapolis, or Portland! It would be shining all night. Not to mention multiple colors for every single holiday or major event.

gary kreie wrote:How much would it cost to light the Eads Bridge and the PSB? I tried to find how much the VP organization paid in the 1980s (1981?) but couldn't seem to find it anywhere.

Just your basic one color like the one being put on the Stan runs about $1million. For more colors it double. Then you need to fund the actual operation and maintence too.

If there was a time to do it for PSB, it's now , MoDOT and IDOT are doing $80m worth of work on in from this summer to 2016, including picking up the entire west bound span and moving it over and adding a lane in the middle. For engineering geeks this is pretty damn awesome, they will literally pick up the whole bridge and move it over

^ With MRB opening and PSB lane addition you would think that the St Louis area has one of the highest bridge lane crossing major waterway per capita in the country. Quietly, the amount of bridge work in the area has been something else

Blanchette Bridge, I70
Westbound Daniel Boone Span, I64
New MRB - Stan Span
Believe major work on I270
PSB

As a someone who was educated as a civil engineer, who still maintains his ASCE membership and works for company that occasionally performs heavy lifts, I can attest that it is pretty cool to literally pick up a bridge of that size and move it over.

dredger wrote:^ With MRB opening and PSB lane addition you would think that the St Louis area has one of the highest bridge lane crossing major waterway per capita in the country. Quietly, the amount of bridge work in the area has been something else

Blanchette Bridge, I70
Westbound Daniel Boone Span, I64
New MRB - Stan Span
Believe major work on I270
PSB

As a someone who was educated as a civil engineer, who still maintains his ASCE membership and works for company that occasionally performs heavy lifts, I can attest that it is pretty cool to literally pick up a bridge of that size and move it over.

I currently am studying CE. We have talked about this and how amazing it is to pick up a bridge this size and move it over.

goat314 wrote:I still think I'm the only St. Louisan that finds it disgraceful that you can come across the river at midnight to a super dark gateway arch. If anything needs solar lighting its the symbol of our city.

Didn't it used to be lighted? I remember maybe around 2006 or so the city spent a couple million installing lights, and it was lit up for a while. And now it never seems to be anymore....

I used to work at the St. Louis Club at the top of a high rise in Downtown Clayton and the view of the Arch was perfect from up there. It seemed to light up at maybe 6 PM no matter what time of the year it was, but I was looking at it from our side. It may not be lit up from the IL side for all I know. However, even the lights I did see on it from our side were weak. I don't know how much it costs to light up a 630 foot tall stainless steel structure...But maybe better Arch illumination is part of the CAR plan. If not, it should be. So should general clean up of the Arch because it's getting dirty.

^ I believe it's not just getting dirty but rusty. There in the process of a few rounds of study, IIRC, to figure out how to solve that. As of now, they say the structural integrity is not in jeopardy, but they're not entirely sure how to clean the rust yet. They're studying it to determine best how.

I thought it was supposed to be stainless. :-\

The theory is that it's the welds and not the steel itself that are causing the reaction and the stains. This is the most recent article I could find, and is from Sept. 2012.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metr ... f6878.html

I was looking around online to see if anyone had taken a good photo yet with the new bridge zoomed in from a distance with the downtown skyline foreshortened for a new iconic view of the skyline. I didn't find one yet. But I did run across this photo:



at this site:

http://experiencemississippiriver.com/s ... teway-arch

When did we light up one of the old bridges North of Eads?

A few pics of the bridge lit up:







Looks really nice, but it's a bummer to see how dark the riverfront is further down the river at the Arch, MLK and Poplar bridges.