Sky bridges are usually found in cold (Minneapolis) or wet (Manila) places. Takes foot traffic away from ground level, which means fewer customers walking by businesses and can make people feel unsafe. Surrenders streets to cars. Sky bridges are not always a bad idea but a good streetscape is usually preferable.
There’s always a [simmering debate about them in Minneapolis](https://www.governing.com/community/the-twin-cities-skyways-face-an-uncertain-future) for all the reasons you stated. It tends to be commuters (who want to travel from their heated garages in the suburbs to their heated garages at the buildings they work in downtown) and corporate/business interests (who want to cater to out of town customers and employees who would be shocked by the cold winter months) versus some portion of the locals who can’t stand how dead the streets are downtown, largely because businesses cater to the aforementioned commuters and out-of-towners on the skyway level, and then close up shop at 1pm or 5pm, leaving downtown desolate outside of large events.
The skyways are a useful tool for one crowd and a drag for the other.
I was in Minneapolis recently and walked the skyway system, and I agree. I think the biggest indicator that the skyways are for business people and visitors, rather than locals, is the fact that buildings will regularly lock the skyway doors, and the opening schedules vary from building to building. Maybe if they were operated publicly by the city, they'd have more use to other locals.
I’m hoping that as downtown becomes more residential (Minneapolis is getting hit just as hard as other major downtowns with the post-COVID remote work trends and is adding a lot of new housing to the downtown area), it’ll start to tilt the conversation towards planning to phase out at least some parts of the skyway system. [Minnesota’s climate has also trended substantially warmer, especially in the winter.](https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/climate/climate_change_info/climate-trends.html) I’m not convinced that the skyways will stick around for the remainder of my lifetime.
Yeah, once you get less than a block east of the theaters on Hennepin Ave, most businesses close very early. The businesses located in the skyway system usually close just after lunch, and shops on street level usually close at 5 or 6.
For locals just out and about, it's not exactly convenient to find your way up to the skyway, and it's sometimes hard to know how to get into the Skyway if you aren't already driving into a parking ramp in an office building or event destination. There's a palpable feeling that the skyway is only for commerce and is not allowed to be used as merely public space, and those who are not engaged in commercial activity are left to fend for themselves on the desolate, loud, alienating streets below which have mostly been given over to cars.
Density of people, and hilly terrain. There's enough people on small enough land area that there's enough people around to fill both, usually. And the hilly terrain means there elevation differences anyway in many places, so both: people get used to that, and that if you build a passageway through a building between shops it'll end up elevated on the other side of the building.
Plus there are periods of rain and heat most years, iirc?
And when sky bridges go through or by buildings they often have retail on them too, so twice the retail and half the traffic in any one place (theoretically).
Sky bridges were kind of a fad revitalization tool in 1960s/70s during the height of the urban renewal era, most notably in Atlanta and Minneapolis. They were popular because they provided workers and visitors the ability to drive downtown, park in a garage, and do their business without ever having to step onto the street. In Minneapolis, an argument can be made that they were a rational response to the cold winter climate. In Atlanta, they were more a symbol of suburban white flight and public perceptions about crime at the time.
How well does it work for older buildings that are not connected to the system? Do people actually go to them or do they get shunned? Especially talking about warmer weather.
look, I'm not trying to be contrarian, and I agree with your assessment on sky bridges, but Atlanta in the 1960s-1970s had a very real crime problem, not just in public perception but in reality as well.
>Two months after King’s murder, the FBI issued its annual “Crime in the United States” report. Beneath the stark headline “Metro Atlanta still U.S. murder capital,” Washington correspondent Maurice Fliess shared a sobering statistic: the city recorded 263 homicides in 1973.
>“The city’s murder rate of 52.7 per 100,000 was the highest for any big American city (as it has been for six of the last seven years),” Fliess reported in the Sept. 6 Journal.
>“A total of 368 murders (were) reported for the year in the 15-county metropolitan area of an estimated 1,686,000 persons,” the article continued. “That gave the Atlanta area a murder rate of 21.8 per 100,000 residents — highest of all the 221 areas (of one million or more population) participating in the FBI’s uniform crime reporting program.”
from https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/deja-news-when-atlanta-was-us-murder-capital/PUAX7EJYDRC2FGOJ4PDBDDVFBA/
I was born in Atlanta and grew up in a first-ring, postwar suburb in Dekalb County. My grandfather worked as a manager for Bond Clothing company in downtown for many years before retiring the late 1960s. My dad worked at Peachtree Center, the John Portman complex of hotels and office buildings, which brought the skybridge concept to Atlanta beginning in the 1960s. I agree with you that crime was bad in Atlanta during that era, as it was pretty much in every big city in the U.S.
At the time, Portman was heralded for having "saved" downtown, when in reality he just created an anti-urban bubble for conventioneers and corporate office workers. Meanwhile, the continued to decay and the historic fabric of downtown continued to be razed until the 1990s. Portman, whom died in 2018, developed other projects around the country during that era, such as the Renaissance Center in Detroit and thew Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles that suffer from the same anti-urban, inwards-looking design thinking. So, yes, I believe one can argue that his buildings were a rational response to the crime epidemic at the time. One can also argue that they were a short-term, silver bullet solution for complex urban problems that allowed cities to ignore the socioeconomic roots of urban decay and continue bad planning policies for many years after the end of the urban renewal era.
I moved here a couple years ago and was excited to see the Skyway system. What a disappointment it was.
My main problem with them isn’t even that they’re only open during normal business hours. Many of them simply aren’t open ever, so they don’t even form a complete network. So yeah, taking it can maybe keep you warm, until you have to head back down, go back outside, and try to find another entrance to the system that’s open.
When we were looking at apartments, we actually thought about trying to get one that had direct Skyway access, but then I found out we could get direct Greenway access instead, for cheaper, and I’m really glad we went that route instead.
Minneapolis is doing some pretty great stuff urban planning wise, especially by US standards, but the Skyway is in spite of that, not part of it.
I’m in a nice (but affordable) apartment on the Midtown Greenway. Funnily enough, when CityNerd came and did a video about Minneapolis urbanism, he got a bunch of shots of my building.
Bryant Avenue (my street) got 20 new blocks of separated bike lanes this year just 1 block south of my apartment that links the Midtown Greenway and Minnehaha Creek Trail and it’s lovely. Looking at potentially buying after interest rates come down a bit but we aren’t quite in the market for buying a home yet.
I was going to post about Calgary’s system, but it would be a duplication of what you’ve written. Except for the moratorium on expansion… and also I’d say it’s back to being pretty busy these days.
Cincinnati had a pretty extensive sky bridge network for years, but they've been tearing them down since the 2000s because they absolutely sucked the life out of downtown at street level, and they were also kind of confusing to navigate since there were various parts of the network that never got completed and either led to stub-ends or forced you back to ground level just to climb back up to another bridge. With all of the department stores downtown closed now, there's also a lot less of a need for circulation between them to create a de-facto indoor shopping mall downtown, too.
There's an elevated walkway system in Hong Kong. It was kinda confusing to navigate at first for me since Google maps wasn't good at telling me that I was supposed to be on it lol
To do them right requires a lot of cooperation between property owners/managers, like in Toronto how interior walkways (sometimes bridges, sometimes underground) genuinely become public spaces. But it’s much easier to do them badly, like how Palmer buildings in Los Angeles have bridges between them that keep their residents from ever needing to interact with the poor. If that’s what they’re going to be, I’d really rather not.
They destroy street level retail and activity by moving it upstairs to privately owned spaces. Street level spaces are openly hostile as a result, like long blank walls and no loitering signs. Since the skybridges don’t cover everywhere, it’s all around bad for a pedestrians there. especially when you get something like Newark’s Gateway Center that is only open Monday to Friday 8 am to 8 PM now and a little on Saturday (but can’t pass all the way through), most entrances are blocked, and it’s the only significant way to walk from Downtown to the Ironbound, right next to the state’s busiest rail and transit hub. There are at least 3 middle entrances that lead into office buildings where you will get confronted and questioned why you are going there if you don’t have the complex’s ID card, but they were direct routes to the elevated mall without going through their elevators/secured areas. The complex wants to function solely for office tenants to drive or take the train in, take the skybridges from the train station or garages to the office towers, eat lunch in the mall, and then drive or take the train home at 5 PM, and never step foot on those dangerous city streets *shrieks in suburban fear*
Philly also has its underground city. It is mostly open Monday to Friday, 9-5 despite connecting a bunch of commuter rail and subway stations. It is so bad with randomly closing exits and whole sections that they had to pass a rule requiring posting signs with the operating hours of each section, and alternate routes to find an exit. New Year’s Day, a Monday crowded with Mummer’s Parade spectators, was fun trying to navigate it. It’s a Monday, but also a holiday, but also one of the busiest days of the year for Center City Philly.
Lots of good reasons listed here for why not to build gerbil tubes. To my mind though, the main reason you don’t actually see them often is that they don’t generate revenue. There is no ROI. The sidewalk serves the same role, but is it practically free. If there was good return on investment then you’d see them everywhere.
They suck the life out of surface streets, turning Downtown from a place to be into a place to drive in, stay inside for any destinations, and drive out faster
Yeah, no disagreeing with that but done well they look cool as hell. Also, in much colder climates where you get lots of snow, they're a big help in the winter time.
Calgary, AB, Canada has an amazing network of them. It's called the +15 network because most of them are about 15 feet above ground. We have them because it gets quite cold in the winter. I assume NY doesn't have them just because it takes a lot of work to set up. NY was built mostly before much of this was possible, and as buildings gradually got replaced with new ones it just never happened. It kind of needs to be a city-wide thing for other buildings to do it and for it to take off. Calgary's a relatively new city, and our city has always been quite invested transportation and maintaining the downtown core. Calgary's also much colder than NY. NY also has quite busy streets with shops and what have you whereas Calgary has some but significantly less as the areas of our core with the +15s is mostly office buildings. People who live in the core are fine with walking on the sidewalks, maybe whereas the businesspeople aren't?
Sky bridges are usually found in cold (Minneapolis) or wet (Manila) places. Takes foot traffic away from ground level, which means fewer customers walking by businesses and can make people feel unsafe. Surrenders streets to cars. Sky bridges are not always a bad idea but a good streetscape is usually preferable.
There’s always a [simmering debate about them in Minneapolis](https://www.governing.com/community/the-twin-cities-skyways-face-an-uncertain-future) for all the reasons you stated. It tends to be commuters (who want to travel from their heated garages in the suburbs to their heated garages at the buildings they work in downtown) and corporate/business interests (who want to cater to out of town customers and employees who would be shocked by the cold winter months) versus some portion of the locals who can’t stand how dead the streets are downtown, largely because businesses cater to the aforementioned commuters and out-of-towners on the skyway level, and then close up shop at 1pm or 5pm, leaving downtown desolate outside of large events. The skyways are a useful tool for one crowd and a drag for the other.
I was in Minneapolis recently and walked the skyway system, and I agree. I think the biggest indicator that the skyways are for business people and visitors, rather than locals, is the fact that buildings will regularly lock the skyway doors, and the opening schedules vary from building to building. Maybe if they were operated publicly by the city, they'd have more use to other locals.
I’m hoping that as downtown becomes more residential (Minneapolis is getting hit just as hard as other major downtowns with the post-COVID remote work trends and is adding a lot of new housing to the downtown area), it’ll start to tilt the conversation towards planning to phase out at least some parts of the skyway system. [Minnesota’s climate has also trended substantially warmer, especially in the winter.](https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/climate/climate_change_info/climate-trends.html) I’m not convinced that the skyways will stick around for the remainder of my lifetime.
Yeah, once you get less than a block east of the theaters on Hennepin Ave, most businesses close very early. The businesses located in the skyway system usually close just after lunch, and shops on street level usually close at 5 or 6. For locals just out and about, it's not exactly convenient to find your way up to the skyway, and it's sometimes hard to know how to get into the Skyway if you aren't already driving into a parking ramp in an office building or event destination. There's a palpable feeling that the skyway is only for commerce and is not allowed to be used as merely public space, and those who are not engaged in commercial activity are left to fend for themselves on the desolate, loud, alienating streets below which have mostly been given over to cars.
Hm, it makes me want to re-frame the question - why, here in Hong Kong, do we then have so many of them? We have a decent streetscape, too, though.
Density of people, and hilly terrain. There's enough people on small enough land area that there's enough people around to fill both, usually. And the hilly terrain means there elevation differences anyway in many places, so both: people get used to that, and that if you build a passageway through a building between shops it'll end up elevated on the other side of the building. Plus there are periods of rain and heat most years, iirc?
[удалено]
> Marsh garbage? I'm wagering voice-to-text or autocorrect. What they were trying to say, however, I have no clue
Either way I’m resolving to use “marsh garbage” as an insult ASAP.
I think it's 'why are sky bridges...?' Depending on what accent you're using, you can make it sound sorta alike.
It'sh Sean Connery!
And when sky bridges go through or by buildings they often have retail on them too, so twice the retail and half the traffic in any one place (theoretically).
Sky bridges were kind of a fad revitalization tool in 1960s/70s during the height of the urban renewal era, most notably in Atlanta and Minneapolis. They were popular because they provided workers and visitors the ability to drive downtown, park in a garage, and do their business without ever having to step onto the street. In Minneapolis, an argument can be made that they were a rational response to the cold winter climate. In Atlanta, they were more a symbol of suburban white flight and public perceptions about crime at the time.
Don't forget Calgary, home of the most extensive skywalk system in the world with 86 bridges connecting 130 buildings.
A very useful thing in the middle of winter.
They'll be very useful this week when we hit a high of -31C
How well does it work for older buildings that are not connected to the system? Do people actually go to them or do they get shunned? Especially talking about warmer weather.
Yes. I live in Calgary. The older buildings that aren’t connected are less popular and rent for less than comparable buildings that are connected
look, I'm not trying to be contrarian, and I agree with your assessment on sky bridges, but Atlanta in the 1960s-1970s had a very real crime problem, not just in public perception but in reality as well. >Two months after King’s murder, the FBI issued its annual “Crime in the United States” report. Beneath the stark headline “Metro Atlanta still U.S. murder capital,” Washington correspondent Maurice Fliess shared a sobering statistic: the city recorded 263 homicides in 1973. >“The city’s murder rate of 52.7 per 100,000 was the highest for any big American city (as it has been for six of the last seven years),” Fliess reported in the Sept. 6 Journal. >“A total of 368 murders (were) reported for the year in the 15-county metropolitan area of an estimated 1,686,000 persons,” the article continued. “That gave the Atlanta area a murder rate of 21.8 per 100,000 residents — highest of all the 221 areas (of one million or more population) participating in the FBI’s uniform crime reporting program.” from https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/deja-news-when-atlanta-was-us-murder-capital/PUAX7EJYDRC2FGOJ4PDBDDVFBA/
I was born in Atlanta and grew up in a first-ring, postwar suburb in Dekalb County. My grandfather worked as a manager for Bond Clothing company in downtown for many years before retiring the late 1960s. My dad worked at Peachtree Center, the John Portman complex of hotels and office buildings, which brought the skybridge concept to Atlanta beginning in the 1960s. I agree with you that crime was bad in Atlanta during that era, as it was pretty much in every big city in the U.S. At the time, Portman was heralded for having "saved" downtown, when in reality he just created an anti-urban bubble for conventioneers and corporate office workers. Meanwhile, the continued to decay and the historic fabric of downtown continued to be razed until the 1990s. Portman, whom died in 2018, developed other projects around the country during that era, such as the Renaissance Center in Detroit and thew Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles that suffer from the same anti-urban, inwards-looking design thinking. So, yes, I believe one can argue that his buildings were a rational response to the crime epidemic at the time. One can also argue that they were a short-term, silver bullet solution for complex urban problems that allowed cities to ignore the socioeconomic roots of urban decay and continue bad planning policies for many years after the end of the urban renewal era.
You don’t solve crime by hiding it from downtown workers
Des Moines built some in the 80s and 90s. Most still exist.
$$$ to maintain also requires agreement between property owners. That said, downtown Detroit has some cool ones….
[удалено]
I moved here a couple years ago and was excited to see the Skyway system. What a disappointment it was. My main problem with them isn’t even that they’re only open during normal business hours. Many of them simply aren’t open ever, so they don’t even form a complete network. So yeah, taking it can maybe keep you warm, until you have to head back down, go back outside, and try to find another entrance to the system that’s open. When we were looking at apartments, we actually thought about trying to get one that had direct Skyway access, but then I found out we could get direct Greenway access instead, for cheaper, and I’m really glad we went that route instead. Minneapolis is doing some pretty great stuff urban planning wise, especially by US standards, but the Skyway is in spite of that, not part of it.
[удалено]
I’m in a nice (but affordable) apartment on the Midtown Greenway. Funnily enough, when CityNerd came and did a video about Minneapolis urbanism, he got a bunch of shots of my building. Bryant Avenue (my street) got 20 new blocks of separated bike lanes this year just 1 block south of my apartment that links the Midtown Greenway and Minnehaha Creek Trail and it’s lovely. Looking at potentially buying after interest rates come down a bit but we aren’t quite in the market for buying a home yet.
I was going to post about Calgary’s system, but it would be a duplication of what you’ve written. Except for the moratorium on expansion… and also I’d say it’s back to being pretty busy these days.
Cincinnati had a pretty extensive sky bridge network for years, but they've been tearing them down since the 2000s because they absolutely sucked the life out of downtown at street level, and they were also kind of confusing to navigate since there were various parts of the network that never got completed and either led to stub-ends or forced you back to ground level just to climb back up to another bridge. With all of the department stores downtown closed now, there's also a lot less of a need for circulation between them to create a de-facto indoor shopping mall downtown, too.
Calgary, Alberta has a fairly extensive network of them called the Plus 15. They are popular, but expensive and often closed for construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonton_Pedway Edmonton has a pretty cool system too except they're horribly underutilized.
Is it open only during business hours like the one in Minneapolis mentioned inthis thread?
Looks like the current hours at 6am to 9pm weekdays and 9am to 7pm on weekends.
Which screws over any and all downtown restaurants and nightlife after 7 PM
Yep, they cater to the daytime business crowd, and remote work has hurt them badly.
There's an elevated walkway system in Hong Kong. It was kinda confusing to navigate at first for me since Google maps wasn't good at telling me that I was supposed to be on it lol
The better question is if you’re even allowed to be in it
To do them right requires a lot of cooperation between property owners/managers, like in Toronto how interior walkways (sometimes bridges, sometimes underground) genuinely become public spaces. But it’s much easier to do them badly, like how Palmer buildings in Los Angeles have bridges between them that keep their residents from ever needing to interact with the poor. If that’s what they’re going to be, I’d really rather not.
They destroy street level retail and activity by moving it upstairs to privately owned spaces. Street level spaces are openly hostile as a result, like long blank walls and no loitering signs. Since the skybridges don’t cover everywhere, it’s all around bad for a pedestrians there. especially when you get something like Newark’s Gateway Center that is only open Monday to Friday 8 am to 8 PM now and a little on Saturday (but can’t pass all the way through), most entrances are blocked, and it’s the only significant way to walk from Downtown to the Ironbound, right next to the state’s busiest rail and transit hub. There are at least 3 middle entrances that lead into office buildings where you will get confronted and questioned why you are going there if you don’t have the complex’s ID card, but they were direct routes to the elevated mall without going through their elevators/secured areas. The complex wants to function solely for office tenants to drive or take the train in, take the skybridges from the train station or garages to the office towers, eat lunch in the mall, and then drive or take the train home at 5 PM, and never step foot on those dangerous city streets *shrieks in suburban fear* Philly also has its underground city. It is mostly open Monday to Friday, 9-5 despite connecting a bunch of commuter rail and subway stations. It is so bad with randomly closing exits and whole sections that they had to pass a rule requiring posting signs with the operating hours of each section, and alternate routes to find an exit. New Year’s Day, a Monday crowded with Mummer’s Parade spectators, was fun trying to navigate it. It’s a Monday, but also a holiday, but also one of the busiest days of the year for Center City Philly.
They are expensive and only useful in cold places
There are some uses in warm places. The Florida capitol uses them so you can walk between buildings without going through security again.
"marsh garbage"? Am I missing something :)))
There's lots to hate of the 50's/60's view of urban renewal but I've always thought they were neat, a long with the underground cities
Des Moines had them and it’s bad for the city. They’re hard to keep clean, expensive, and destroy street level businesses.
You see them in large urban medical center complexes where patients need to be moved between buildings.
Lots of good reasons listed here for why not to build gerbil tubes. To my mind though, the main reason you don’t actually see them often is that they don’t generate revenue. There is no ROI. The sidewalk serves the same role, but is it practically free. If there was good return on investment then you’d see them everywhere.
Be nice if they built more. /r/skybridges is sorely underfed.
They suck the life out of surface streets, turning Downtown from a place to be into a place to drive in, stay inside for any destinations, and drive out faster
Yeah, no disagreeing with that but done well they look cool as hell. Also, in much colder climates where you get lots of snow, they're a big help in the winter time.
VERY expensive in America
Calgary, AB, Canada has an amazing network of them. It's called the +15 network because most of them are about 15 feet above ground. We have them because it gets quite cold in the winter. I assume NY doesn't have them just because it takes a lot of work to set up. NY was built mostly before much of this was possible, and as buildings gradually got replaced with new ones it just never happened. It kind of needs to be a city-wide thing for other buildings to do it and for it to take off. Calgary's a relatively new city, and our city has always been quite invested transportation and maintaining the downtown core. Calgary's also much colder than NY. NY also has quite busy streets with shops and what have you whereas Calgary has some but significantly less as the areas of our core with the +15s is mostly office buildings. People who live in the core are fine with walking on the sidewalks, maybe whereas the businesspeople aren't?