Pedestrian Bridges & Underpasses

Pedestrian bridges offer an excellent opportunity to enhance the trail experience since most trails are situated in a natural environment requiring water or roadway crossings. Pedestrian bridges also provide an opportunity to celebrate the feature being crossed by highlighting the crossing or providing an interesting destination in itself. Most trails projects cannot afford highly detailed bridges at each crossing, but occasional “landmark” structures at critical locations help give a trail unique character.

As our urban trails become more widely used, and our streets more congested, safe street crossings have become increasingly important. LORIS has designed numerous trail under-crossings of busy streets and highways. We understand the critical design issues ranging from safety, to utility relocation, to construction phasing. Phasing is one of the primary considerations of building underpasses because, in most cases, the street being crossed must remain fully operational during construction. And, similar to our bridges and structures, we like to incorporate aesthetics into our underpass designs. The following selected projects represent a cross-section of LORIS’ capabilities in pedestrian bridge and underpass design.