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One of the worst, ugly, uncomfortable, smelly, loud, horrible, inconvenient, lame and dangerous (seeming) parts of the University of Minnesota Minneapolis Campus is Washington Avenue. As it descends into a trench approaching the Mississippi the traffic gets even nastier and it gets concrete-ier magnifying the roar of engines to an uncomfortable anxiety inducing din. A lovely rusty steel, concrete and wire barrier and speeding 4 lanes of traffic stops pedestrians from crossing to the student union from the central campus mall. As you wait for the bus in that trench the roar of traffic is deafening, If it is dark the lack of escape routes in the concrete trench makes it frightening. This is not helped on the East Bank by the Frank Gehry museum dirty stainless steel monstrosity with no windows or doors and a pedestrian deck that starts at the Washington Bridge and blots out the sun. On the West Bank, ecch, it is worse and words fail to describe the horror.
The bridge itself has the all the charm of the underdeck of the old San Francisco Bay Bridge, but the rusty riveted steel does not have the barge resistant strength of the Bay Bridge, it seems a bit spindly barely able to hold up the pedestrian deck or even the car deck. These design elements of heightened fear and hellish anxiety may have been appropriate for the 1970's to create a backlash against a rebellious bunch of student peacenik hippies to cow them into submission, (take that, free love humping longhairs), but these days it is just an artifact of fugly stupidity that proves that bad design is bad for your health, and it is - the Washington Bridge is THE favorite spot in Minneapolis for people to jump to their deaths.
The light rail transit line is routed down Washington Ave and the bridge IS actually a bit spindly and has been determined by the MNDOT that it will not hold up both a train and highway traffic. As the state cannot afford to tunnel through the campus, with much grumbling and whining the University of MN has decided a design alternative is to have a pedestrian/transit mall to shock the state into coughing up the cash to pay for a tunnel. I think that they reason that shutting down a 4-lane raceway is so foreign to the thinking of MNDOT and the public that an outcry of road rage will loosen up the tax wallet.
I actually think this pedestrian thingy is a good idea, so it will not happen. Walkability on the campus is hampered at Washington Avenue and the loss of automobile (and bus) access will mean that car traffic in general will decrease in the University area, (see studies of induced traffic.) Of course, unless a can opener is used on the Gehry steel cladding and the sides of the trench are graded it will still be ugly and kind of scary, but in a quieter and more peaceful way. The West Bank side will still be a complete horror, only dynamite will improve it.
Walkability and lack of automobile traffic is the last thing that any of the current people in power want, they just built a stadium for less than a dozen football games per year that is at the terminus of Washington Avenue and all the retail near the campus is crying that they will die without 20K autos/day.
UPDATE, April 2008: The Regents of the University have rerouted the Light Rail Transit (LRT) to be off the Washington Avenue route and getting rid of the pedestrian mall idea. Just as Governor Pawlenty line item vetoed his own budget for LRT.
UPDATE, September 2008: The reroute is dead, back to LRT on the Washington Avenue route. Still no LRT funds. And the pedestrian deck has been declared unsafe except for 14 feet in the middle of the bridge so there is no bicycling across the bridge, all bikes must be walked. The pedestrian deck has been festooned with cyclone fence and looks like a narrow GITMO prison corridor, there are no views of the river any more as people must walk inside the roofed portion inside cyclone fencing of the 14 foot corridor. A new low of squalor has been created in ugly spalling concrete and rust.