Crossing Over to the Other Side

The bridges in North County lead fairly unassuming lives. They have never appeared in an Alfred Hitchcock film, nor do they boast of being the longest, oldest or highest of their class.

To a motorist whizzing by at 55 m.p.h., the uniform boxiness of many bridges tends to fade into a blur. At most, we expect our bridges to provide a brief spot of shade as we go under them or to get us beyond an obstacle as we go over them.

However, for all of their boxed girders, prestress cables, gleaming steel and tons of concrete, these bridges do have their own histories and personalities. A closer look at some of the bridges in North County disproves the assumption that, if you’ve seen one bridge, you’ve pretty much seen them all.

There is, for example, the West Lilac Road Bridge that visually knocks the wind from your sails with its sleek, high arch, set against nothing but a clear blue sky as you drive north.

It is quite a contrast to the now defunct 66-year-old San Luis Rey River Bridge in Bonsall that almost escapes detection standing in the shadow of a newer, bigger bridge designed to handle traffic more safely and efficiently.

There are scores of bridges in North County. They cross rivers and lakes, connect canyons and hillsides that have been plowed through to make new freeways.

The California Department of Transportation has a structural design department in Sacramento that is responsible for creating the state’s bridge plans. In the late ‘70s, when many of the North County bridges were being built, bridge architects were constantly shuttling between Sacramento and San Diego.

“We were designing a bridge a day at that time,” recalls William Wells, a bridge architect for Caltrans in Sacramento, who designed the West Lilac Road arch on Interstate 15. “The late 1970s were the hey days of the interstate system and a lot of bridges were being designed then.

“I’m responsible for half the state,” Wells said. “When I’m driving with my wife, every time we go by a bridge, I say, ‘Hey! That’s one I did.’ ”

In addition to beauty and access, safety is a top attribute among these bridges. Although a study by the National Transportation Safety Board reports that the nation’s half million bridges are in need of some repair and closer inspection, North County’s newer bridges are outfitted with the latest in earthquake protection, and all bridges are inspected every other year for wear and defects.

Registered civil engineers look for, among a long list of things, settling at the abutments, deck deterioration and the workability of joint seals.

“We learned a lot from the (San Fernando Valley) quake in 1971,” said Ed Bankston, a bridge engineer for Caltrans. “We addressed a lot of earthquake safety issues after that.”

For example, most bridges built after 1972 were not constructed with hinges, Bankston said. This ensures that the bridge deck won’t buckle like the San Francisco Bay Bridge did in the 1989 earthquake.

Another safety factor that gives a nod toward economics is that most North County bridges are made of pre-stress concrete. This is the practice of pouring concrete around stretched cables to give it added strength. It not only makes for a sleeker line, but it uses less cable, Bankston said.

Deterioration of bridge decks is not the problem it was two decades ago because the quality of concrete has improved since the early 1970s, and the thickness has been increased. Guard rails, too, were designed to withstand almost any amount of punishment.

“I’m not going to say nothing can happen to them, but they’ve been heavily reinforced and tested with buses and various things at different rates of speed,” Bankston said. “In fairness, if you’re going 100 m.p.h. and you get airborne, you may go over the rail. You won’t knock it down, but you may go over the top of it.”

In between safety inspections, many other sets of eyes monitor these bridges in a less formal fashion. Besides Caltrans maintenance crews that patrol stretches of freeway weekly if not daily, there is the California Highway Patrol. The CHP can often spot something amiss, and it helps keep Caltrans abreast of a bridge’s condition.

For the time being, there are no major new bridges on the drawing table for North County.

The county of San Diego, which now owns the old San Luis Rey River Bridge, has no immediate plans to build any new bridges in North County, said planner Mark Carroll. Caltrans, which owns and maintains more than 12,000 bridges statewide, also has no plans for the area.

Here are some of the bridges that now take thousands of North County residents from one side to the other--and often back again--each day:

West Lilac Road Bridge

Interstate 15

Begun in July, 1976, and completed in May, 1978, the West Lilac Road Bridge is about 10 miles north of Escondido and is stunning no matter which direction you are traveling.

Spanning 695 feet across a road cut and looming 150 feet high, the Lilac Bridge provides an impressive gateway to the northern inland reaches of the county as well as a lingering view as you head south into Escondido.

Architect Wells got his inspiration from the environment surrounding the bridge site. He said the rolling hills and terrain encouraged him to do something out of the ordinary.

“The location really did most of the stimulation for what kind of bridge would fit in there,” he said. “It’s like making a dress. The material may stimulate you or dictate to you what kind of dress you can make out of it.”

The arch design, besides its aesthetic value, made good sense structurally. “We had quite a large cut of road to cross and the terrain dictated to put in an arch,” Wells said. “If we had used vertical columns, the proportions would have been bad. The columns would have had to be almost as long as the bridge itself.”

Wells said he had a lot of encouragement from Caltrans to do something aesthetically pleasing and eye-catching. The Lilac Road site lent itself to that.

“If you go from the valley into San Diego, you’re going to see that bridge from a long ways off. The District 11 people (San Diego and Imperial counties) were enthusiastic about doing something good so there was added impetus there,” he said.

The West Lilac Road Bridge has one lane in either direction open to traffic. In 1976, it cost about $1.5 million to build.

The bridge’s sleek design has won several national design awards including one from the Portland Cement Assn. and the Prestressed Concrete Institute. Wells still gets fan mail.

“I’ve had a few letters from people saying, ‘Hey, that bridge is great!’ That’s the ultimate award, when someone you don’t even know says, ‘Hey, that looks great.’ It’s like being a teacher when they see the light come on inside their students’ heads.”

Lake Hodges Bridge

Interstate 15

Escondido

“There’s nothing aesthetically pleasing about the Lake Hodges Bridge,” Caltrans bridge engineer Bankston readily admits, although he personally had a hand in widening the bridge in 1978 when Interstate 15 became an interstate. “If there’s water in the lake, the bridge will get you over it.”

Widening Lake Hodges was a challenge because construction workers had to work around the water, Bankston said. “It seems like every time we work on it, there is water underneath there and every time we get through, the water goes away,” he said.

Nesting swallows became an annoyance during the expansion project, Bankston said. Construction crews were constantly scraping off nests the swallows made smack in the middle of their work site, he said.

Undaunted, the swallows would simply relocate to a portion of the bridge not under construction. They reside there now, Bankston said.

The total length of the bridge is 665 feet and it is about 20 feet high. The original four-lane bridge was built in 1969 and dedicated with Champagne and a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The bridge expansion project completed in 1978 was not so feted, despite the fact it was widened to eight lanes (four in either direction) at a cost of $5 million.

San Luis Rey River Bridge

California 76

Bonsall

The old: Built in 1925 by San Diego County with the help of Youth Conservation Corps volunteers, the old San Luis Rey River Bridge was placed on the National Register of Historical Places in April, 1983. It is one of only two bridges of its design and construction still standing in Southern California. The other is in the Los Angeles area.

In April, 1990, after decades of ownership, Caltrans relinquished the bridge to San Diego County, and it was then formally dedicated as a pedestrian, equestrian and bike trail. Cars and trucks are no longer allowed on the bridge that was once a popular route for big rig trucks.

The 667-foot-long bridge is structurally sound but only 24-feet-wide, so narrow that truck drivers often had to wait for oncoming truck traffic to pass rather than meet it on the bridge. A sharp curve on the bridge’s approach also made it hazardous for motorists.

The new bridge eliminated these safety hazards.

The new: Five thousand cubic yards of concrete and about a million pounds of steel went into the making of the new San Luis Rey River Bridge that opened in 1990. The new pre-stress structure, built 500 feet upstream from the old bridge, has a straighter alignment than the old bridge, thus eliminating the hazardous curve that plagued motorists.

And, at 40-feet-wide, truck drivers don’t have to hold their breath and worry about their rig’s girth as they cross. Nobody seems to mind going the extra distance; the new bridge is 1,328-feet-long, almost twice as long as the old bridge.

Construction of the new bridge was not all smooth sailing, however. A little gray migratory songbird held up construction for years.

The least Bell’s vireo, which nests only in southwestern California and is proposed for inclusion on the federal endangered species list, likes to nest in riparian habitats, just like the one directly under where the new bridge was to be built. Caltrans had to create a new nesting site for these birds before bridge work could commence.

Murray Road Toll Bridge

Oceanside

When it opened its collection booths in January, 1984, the Murray Road Toll Bridge became only the second bridge in San Diego County to charge for its use, and city officials still say it is a bargain.

The bridge was the brainchild of City Councilwoman Melba Bishop, and her efforts to build the toll bridge including getting a state law amended to allow private and public agencies to be formed to have bonds for public purposes. On ribbon-cutting day, Bishop was the first to drive across the 654-foot-span.

The bridge was meant as a permanent solution to a section of Murray Road that flooded every time a storm dumped any appreciable rain into the San Luis Rey River. It now also serves as the most direct route from Vista, San Marcos and Carlsbad to the back gate of Camp Pendleton.

“Some of us remember children dying in that river, times that our husbands couldn’t go to work because the water was so high, and other times when we worried whether a fire truck could ever get to us if we had a fire. I mean, we were surrounded by water on all sides,” Bishop said in a Times interview shortly after the bridge’s five-year anniversary.

But how to pay for it?

The city of Oceanside did not have the funds to build the bridge outright. Toll revenues seemed the ideal solution, said Dana Whitson, principle assistant to the city manager in Oceanside.

The 50-cent tolls go toward the bridge’s $5.175-million price tag. This debt will be paid over 25 years and includes the construction, cost of land that was not city owned and maintenance, Whitson said.

“The tolls pay more than the debt service on the bonds, which is one of the beauties of this bridge,” Whitson said. “This is a real nice system where people who use the bridge pay for it.”

Tolls are collected 24 hours a day on the bridge’s northbound side only. Annually, about $1.05 million is collected, Whitson said. Pedestrians and bicyclists do not have to pay, she said.

About 6,600 motorists go in the pay direction on weekdays and about 4,400 on any given Saturday or Sunday, Whitson said. The number of travelers heading in the free direction is somewhat more, she said.

The alternate route is a 7-mile detour.

“In terms of time and cost, the bridge is probably the cheapest way to go,” Whitson said. “The beauty of it is that it’s an individual choice, and it makes people more conscious of providing that kind of service.”

Two lanes in both directions are now in operation, but the bridge was designed to expand to six lanes when the need warrants, Whitson said.