Bismarck, North Dakota - News

It's nice that the state Department of Transportation is checking in with citizens on the look of the new Liberty Memorial Bridge between Bismarck and Mandan. But it shouldn't feel bound by the results when they run contrary to common sense, as with the see-through railings.

At a public meeting in March, the small number of citizens in attendance expressed a narrow, 22-12, preference for horizontal rather than vertical railings. Maybe they liked the look, but they can't have been thinking of the view.

There is no way that horizontal railings, with their continuous lines of interruption, can offer the desired view of the river and riverbank. Vertical railings, on the other hand, afford about the same transparency as telephone poles flipping past beside a high-speed highway.

As it happens, a technical advisory committee of the state Department of Transportation objected to the horizontal offering of its own department on safety grounds, the possibility of children climbing up and over.

This would seem to be easy to correct, while preserving horizontality: Incline the railings inward, and put a lid on top. Safety, the reason we're replacing the old bridge, has to be the first feature of the new. But horizontal railings should be thrown out, in any case, on visibility grounds.

Everyone seems to want to get away from the plain, undistinguished, generic, bridge-bridge look of the Grant Marsh and Expressway bridges, and this is all to the good. We're spending all this money -- $40 million, with a 10-percent local share; at the end of it, we ought to have something we can look at without bursting into tears or sighs.

Also, the present Liberty Memorial occupies a special place not just in our landscape but in our history, the first vehicular bridge across the Missouri River north of Omaha. Its replacement deserves to be as distinctive as we can make it consistent with function, modern engineering and our budget.

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