American River Bridges: Folsom Rainbow Bridge

Just downstream from the Historic Folsom Truss Bridge is the Rainbow Bridge, which carries Greenback Lane over the American River. For many years, this was the only bridge across the American River, which must have been a real hassle in such a highly populated area. Even today, it has too much traffic on an antiquated structure that needs to be replaced.

The Rainbow Bridge was built in 1917 and was widened from 23.33 ft to 31.0 ft in 1969. It has a 209 ft long open spandrel arch span over the river, seven T-girder approach spans to the north of the river and four T-girder approach to the south of the river for a total length of 511 ft.

The bridge only has one lane of traffic in each direction, narrow shoulders, and a 4 ft sidewalk but it carries about 38,000 vehicles a day. Also, the bridge is eligible to be on the list of Historic Places. The city of Folsom will have to make some hard choices whether they should keep this historic structure or replace it with a new, wider bridge.

American River Bridges: Folsom Rainbow Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.