Eagle Road pedestrian bridge had ‘humble beginnings.’ It’s now a $3.2M project

In 2013, a small group of Eagle residents, made up of avid walkers and bikers, began urging the Idaho Transportation Department to make one of its highway bridges over the Boise River safer for pedestrians.

Ten years and $2 million later, the city of Eagle is preparing to open its Eagle Road pedestrian and bike bridge over the Boise River.

The bridge aims to provide walkers and cyclists easier access across the Boise River along Eagle Road. For years cyclists and walkers have had to traverse the bridge, shoulder to shoulder, with cars traveling 55 mph across the state highway.

Those experiences are what led Rick Tholen to start an advocacy group, Walk and Ride Eagle, for the bridge 10 years ago. Tholen has lived across the river from downtown Eagle for a decade and has spent that time making the treacherous journey on a bicycle across the bridge.

“When people think about their youth, they remember how liberating it is to be able to get out on their bike and do stuff — to go get an ice cream without Mom or Dad having to drive them,” Tholen told the Idaho Statesman in 2019. “No parent is going to let their kid make that crossing alone.”

It’s been four years since the Statesman’s initial story on Tholen’s effort to make a safer river crossing. With only weeks before the bridge opens for public use, Tholen recalled the project’s origin story and its changes.

The bridge, which was completed earlier this month, runs adjacent to Eagle Road and is attached to the Eagle Greenbelt along the Boise River.

Tholen said he thought a simple and cheap fix could make Eagle Road safer. What started as a push for a barrier between cars and pedestrians on Eagle Road turned into a $3.2 million project for the city.

“This started from humble beginnings, when all we wanted was a safe place on the highway bridge to walk, and came to a $3.2 million bridge,” Tholen told the Statesman in an interview at the Alchemist Coffee Shop in downtown Eagle. “How does it evolve to something like that?”

ITD slow to help pedestrians

The Eagle Road bridge connects many of the large subdivisions south of the city to the hub of downtown Eagle.

Tholen thought the solution to the issue could be simple. He first asked the department if they could put barriers between the lanes of cars and the shoulder so pedestrians are barricaded from traffic.

“The jersey barriers take up 3 or 4 feet,” Tholen said. “So then maybe we’d have a 5-foot path to walk behind these, and that would be fine.”

But in a phone call, Tholen said a department official told him that option would put the barriers too close to traffic.

In an email, Aubrie Latimore, spokesperson for ITD, told the Statesman that the department had concerns with adding pedestrian access to a busy highway road.

“While we do not prohibit pedestrians or bicycles from using the existing 8- to 10-foot shoulder on the highway, we do have concerns with reducing the current paved travel way and promoting additional recreational use of the roadside that could impact the safety of other users,” she said.

Then, Tholen said he suggested reducing the speed limit from 55 to 35 mph over the bridge. But the answer was also no, he said. ITD officials said they couldn’t reduce the speed because it would impact traffic movement.

Tholen’s last suggestion was to build a new bridge for pedestrians and bikers that would attach to the existing Eagle Road bridge. The idea gained some traction from the city and the Community Planning Association of Southwest Idaho, which conducted a feasibility study on the project.

The city, Walk and Ride Eagle, the Two Rivers Community, a subdivision south of the river, and ITD proposed a bicycle pedestrian bridge adjacent to the west side of Eagle Road, the Statesman reported in 2019. The $1.3 million project would connect the bridge to the shoulder of the Idaho 55 bridge, spanning 240 feet.

But months later, the department pulled out of the plan. The Statesman reported that a department spokesperson said the Eagle Road bridge could not accommodate the additional load of an attached bridge.

Building a detached bridge added $1 million to the original estimate.

“It wasn’t necessarily what I wanted or what it could have been,” Tholen said.

Tholen said he thinks if ITD had been more open to a speed limit decrease or concrete barriers, it would have been a cheaper fix for the safety issue. He worries that because of a multi-million-dollar bridge, the city will have less money for any future bike and pedestrian or park projects.

Eagle bridge is a legacy project for city, staff

Despite the financial challenges and some setbacks, Nichoel Baird Spencer, long-range planner for the city of Eagle, is excited to finally open the bridge to the public

“I spend a lot of time talking about the future,” Baird Spencer said by phone. “So it’s really rewarding to see a project be completed. It’s very rare that you get a legacy project, something my grandson will be able to say that his grandma helped make that happen. Those are exciting things for me.”

Baird Spencer agreed that roadway projects in Ada County can be difficult to navigate, since cities do not have authority over the roadways. They are either managed by the Ada County Highway District or ITD.

“It was a different philosophy that ITD had,” she said. “ITD policy does not advocate for pathways and trails or sidewalks in their right-of-ways.”

That is up to the city where the highway is located, she said.

“We had to work through that,” Baird Spencer said. ‘We had a mid-course correction where we went all the way through initial study of an attached bridge, and then it wasn’t an attached bridge. We then had to go into a whole new engineering study of how that bridge would function.”

In its statement, ITD said officials spoke to the city and Tholen’s citizen group about pedestrian safety on Eagle Road and offered options.

“Ultimately those options were not pursued over concerns with operations and maintenance,” Latimore said in the email.

Funding was another hurdle the city had to jump. Baird Spencer said it took five years to plan the bridge and another five years to find funding sources.

Eventually the city got nearly the whole project funded through Federal Transportation Alternative Program and Surface Transportation Block grants. The city allocated $200,000 toward construction.

The bridge is an important connection for the city of Eagle, Baird Spencer said, but also the entire valley.

The city is planning a ribbon cutting for the bridge on Friday, April 21, Baird Spencer said.

Dozens of Eagle, Avimor residents testify at hearing. Here’s what happened 6 hours later

He was thrown from wheelchair on Eagle Senior Center bus and died. Fallout has been swift