Palm Beach County, Florida Bridges: Florida Turnpike UC over Glades Road

December 2012 (26.368 Degrees, -80.171 Degrees) Florida Turnpike UC

I only had an afternoon to photograph a few bridges in Florida. Hopefully, I'll have future opportunities to photograph the many historic, modern, and interesting Florida bridges.

A useful resource for my visit was "Historic Highway Bridges of Florida,"published by the Florida Department of Transportation. I wonder if there was a request from the Federal Highway Administration for each state to make a public record of their historic bridges? Caltrans published "Historic Highway Bridges of California" in the 1990s.

While I was in Florida, I noticed that many of the highway bridges had Mechanically-Stabilized Earth (MSE) abutments. This has been an area of intense study at Caltrans since we rely on the soil around our abutments to reduce the displacements of shorter bridges during earthquakes. Currently, we are requiring that large diameter piles support the ends of our bridges when MSE Walls support the bridge approaches.

I had mentioned earlier that the Intracoastal Waterway bridges were regularly repainted. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of highway bridges. I would recommend that concrete bridges shouldn't be painted, since it's an unnecessary expense, and they look bad when the paint starts to peel.

Palm Beach County, Florida Bridges: Florida Turnpike UC over Glades Road by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.