bridge over troubled back streets (bridge) 8.2.02

This proposed Avenue G viaduct has got me a bit perplexed. I understand the need to move more traffic from one side of town to the other but it seems to me that people need to have a reason to go from point A to point B along a certain route, am I wrong?
What exactly is the motivation to travel from point A on Avenue G to point B further along Avenue G near 16th Street? Do 4,500 people a day really need day old bread and beef jerky that bad?
I am the perfect candidate for using this new viaduct and even I don't see the upside. I live on the east side of town, I go to Comic City and Lipstix (to do research on my novel) with breath-taking regularity and I can't see the advantage of a big bridge on G besides moderately improving emergency response times.
I would think a better idea might be a newer, wider, swifter viaduct where the current one is standing or perhaps one on 9th or 5th that would make heavily traveled streets easier to navigate during crunch time.
Getting stuck waiting for a train is aggravating and a painful reminder of how awkwardly Council Bluffs is laid out. The current viaduct is so heavily used, by Crom, it feels more like a parking lot than a roadway. Even with the new viaduct, there are still parts of town that can be totally cut off from the outside world if two trains are running at the same time. I call this section of town The Bermuda Triangle because I was once stuck down there wearing Bermuda shorts and was taunted by bikers.
I may just be a simple country boy, but it seems to me that a another bridge is just trying to catch moonbeams with a butterfly net. The real problem in Council Bluffs is that we have railroad tracks running right through the center of our town from one end to the other.
In most towns, you see railroad tracks on the ugly industrial side of town, out of the way for the most part. With C.B., the tracks are about three blocks from City Hall.
I grew up right by a set of train tracks and it can be annoying, but in all honesty, you get used to the screeching and honking, the exhaust, the ground shaking and the sight of a leviathon cruising past your kitchen window at 65 m.p.h. You hear about derailments, but you put them out of your mind. I even had a dog lose a leg to a train. Frankly, he should have known better than to chase it.
And while train tracks aren't the worst thing in the world, they do have a stigma attached to them. There is "the right side of the tracks" and "the wrong side of the tracks." For over a hundred years, the vast majority of C.B. has had the unfortunate and inappriate distinction of being on "the wrong side of the tracks."
We can build all the bridges we want, but at the end of the day, we still have more tracks than an Amsterdam city park after midnight. We are wedged in between the river, the tracks and the hills. We need some breathing room and beyond picking the entire city up and moving it halfway to Glenwood, we might just be stuck unless we can get the Union Pacific to take their rails underground.
Maybe we could take the streets under the tracks, it works like a dream out at big lake. At least then we could avoid turning the length of Avenue G into the same kind of wasteland that sits under the current viaduct and prevent Avenue G residents from becoming trolls.
I'm just one guy with no degree in community and regional planning to fall back on, but I have played hundreds of hours of "Sim City." And if being Mayor Jerrett-san of Ho Chi Greg City has tought me anything, it's that it is hard to run a city of this size. You have constant growing pains. One little slip up like a flood, earthquake, plague of locusts or UFO invasion and half your town moves away. Getting over that 100,000 hump is hard. There's never enough money to do what you need to do let alone what you really want to do. And you would have to be psychic to know what is going to work ahead of time.
Until we find the cheat code that let's us have unlimited funds, no crime, great education, jobs and entertainment, the best we can do is let our city council know what we think in the most rational manner possible. Let them know you have concerns in the Nonpareil opinion section and at council meetings.
While there is likely no solution that will make everyone happy, there are alway options to consider.
- Greg Jerrett is a Nonpareil staff writer. His column runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays. He may be contacted at 328-1811, Ext. 279, or by e-mail at gjerrett@nonpareilonline.com.