Santa Cruz County, California Bridges: Glen Arbor Road Bridge across the San Lorenzo River

March 2014 (37.07427 Degrees, -122.08396 Degrees) Glen Arbor Road Bridge

Traveling south on State Route 9, I stopped to look at several bridges over the San Lorenzo River but they were the usual steel stringer or precast I girder bridges. The first interesting bridge I came upon carried Glen Arbor Road over the San Lorenzo River onto SR 9 (see photo above). 

I had to ask a local resident's permission to enter his backyard to photograph this bridge. There was no public access available to see the San Lorenzo River at this location. The Glen Arbor Road Bridge (36C0040) turned out to be a 3-span continuous, cast-in-place, reinforced concrete box girder bridge. This bridge is 217 ft long with a 115 ft long main span and it was built in 1968.

It's an attractive modern bridge with very wide overhangs and tall single column bents. The circular columns have pinched one-way flares on top. The west abutment is considerably larger to support the widened superstructure that allows traffic to make left and right turns onto State Route 9.

Santa Cruz County, California Bridges: Glen Arbor Road Bridge across the San Lorenzo River by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.