The French Prairie Bike Bridge would open the old Boones Ferry Road and all of French Prairie/Champoeg to those cyclists who are not willing to risk life and limb on the Boone Bridge. Too bad you didn't get a chance to try Boones Ferry Road on the other side of the river, where it still looks much as it did before the freeway came in and it was still something of an arterial into the Valley. I think this is probably the same reason Canby still has a ferry over the river instead of a bridge, even today. If the line isn't drawn right here, the whole north end of the Willamette Valley inevitably becomes a cold, dreary, repressed version of L.A. A car bridge would cause subdivisions, the theory goes, and if the sprawl monster leaps the Willamette, there aren't any further natural barriers between Portland and Salem. My understanding is that the Willamette at Wilsonville is seen as a sort of moat against urban sprawl. One thing that isn't in the cards, apparently, is building a new bridge for regular auto traffic. Which is undoubtedly the right approach, if the money exists to do it. There've been discussions in the past about adding dedicated bike/ped space to either the Boone Bridge or the railroad bridge just upstream, but the preferred approach now seems to be to build a very shiny new bridge just for bikes, pedestrians, and the occasional emergency vehicle. People do this because right now there's no good way to get across the river by bike or on foot, and the only way to go by car is on the freeway. It looks dangerous, and not the fun kind of dangerous, either. Since I can't predict the future all that accurately, I won't absolutely say I never will, but I will say that I probably won't. It's legal, believe it or not, and a few hardy souls (cyclists, mostly) actually use the damn thing. In theory, I could do the whole schmear and walk the bridge. The marina across the river is, I think, the site of the other ferry terminal on the south bank of the river. That's where I took these, along with a bunch of photos of the nearby railroad bridge. Was the land cheap? Was it to build political support by splitting the road-building jobs among all 3 metro counties? It's a curious thing, and I don't have a good answer for it.Īt the far south end of Boones Ferry Road is Boones Ferry Park, site of the old ferry terminal. I've never seen a good explanation for why it turned out that way. For some reason, the route of I-5 south from about Tigard runs exactly along the Washington-Multnomah and then Washington-Clackamas county lines. The idea of a ruler-straight, non-river-following highway between Portland and Salem is a relatively recent innovation, as it turns out. Most people used 99E down through Milwaukie, Oregon City, & Canby, and others used 99W, which heads SW out to McMinnville and cuts south from there. One forgets that until I-5 went in, this was absolutely not a major transportation corridor. There's a couple of old buildings in Tualatin, and it turns out there's a rather small and rustic "old town" to Wilsonville, too, along Boones Ferry south of Wilsonville Road. Miles and miles of suburbia from start to finish. Since the Boone Bridge replaced the earlier Boone's Ferry, I thought I'd make a project of it and drive the length of Boones Ferry Road, from Portland down to Wilsonville. But at least I got some bridge photos, for whatever that's worth. That part didn't go so well, actually - I took one look at the checkout line snaking through the store, and decided it wasn't worth it. Well, that plus the fact that I was in the neighborhood anyway, unwisely braving the wilds of Fry's Electronics on Black Friday. I figured I ought to at least drop by and take a couple of photos of it for the sake of completeness, as part of the ongoing bridge project. Even the Structurae page for it is kind of perfunctory, as if even they couldn't get excited about the thing. Couple of so-so photos of the Boone Bridge, the I-5 bridge over the Willamette at Wilsonville.
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