Is there such a thing as private overpasses over highways? Somewhere north of Camp Roberts and Paso Robles on highway 101 there’s an overpass with no apparent exits connecting to it. It looks kind of shittier than a standard overpass. Is there such a thing as a “private” overpass connecting 2 sections of a farm or something like that?
I was driving North of Park City, Utah and got lost on 80 heading towards Coalville, which was not my intention. I wanted to pull a u-turn and kept on coming across overpasses with no onramps or offramps. I really could not turn around until I got to Coalville. These overpasses also sort of looked like private ones although it looks like there is a public frontage road running alongside the freeway. This kind of brought up the question.
I don’t see why not, though it would be expensive and therefore rare. IBM has an offramp that is an overpass over Warden Ave in Markham, Ontario, for example.
It’s something you’d bargain for when they drove a freeway through your land. Normally, though, if you pointed out to them that the part of your land cut off by the freeway would be useless without access, they’d just buy the land from you; that would be cheaper than building and maintaining an overpass, unless whatever activity you had going on the land was very profitable, and not something you could transfer to another location.
Obviously a pedestrian overpass costs less, and you’ll find them more frequently.
There’s a stretch of the M50 orbital motorway around Dublin where, within a few hundred metres, you pass under five overpasses, only two of which are connected by junction to the motorway. The other three carry a public road, the Dublin-Sligo railway line and a canal and towpath respectively. None of them are strictly private, though.
The “Hunter Valley Express Way” was recently completed.
Because it cut through a private railway, (privately owned and operated, only for coal),
the government built an overpass for that railway , and only for it ! I guess the government will continue to own the overpass, but the railway line itself is currently in private control.
So its a private use overpass.
One month after the express way opened, 2 people died in a collapse at the coal mine, and so its shut down … the coal trains stopped… it may never open again (there’s coal everywhere around the Hunter Valley so the more expensive and more dangerous operations may remain shut.)
So its the now completely useless overpass ?? Well the idea is that should the coal trains stop, the historic stream trains may well ply the route…as a side attraction to the wineries…
I would think that the option of a private UNDERpass could be considered here more often than not? seems to be the unobtrusive way to maintain access and not restrict height potential for the roads.
I know of a farm that has an underpass going under the 101 highway. When they built the highway it split the farm in two. It was a dairy farm and the cows would need a way to be brought into the barn.
It’s not 100% private, because it’s also a public footpath, but here’s one such overpass not far from where I live. It’s not over a highway, exactly, but it is over a fairly recently built bypass.
In the aerial view you can see that it is there to give access between the farm and the fields to the south. Presumably there was a track there before the new road was built, and the landowner got the road builders to add a bridge. Whether this was only possible because it is a public footpath as well a farm track, I don’t know.
I think I have seen one Re IBM in NY but since that road is connected to public roads I’m not sure it’s private. I have also seen piplines, conveyer belts (coal) elevated across highways, sometimes under as well.
Somewhat related, the Cross Bronx Expressway (technically the Trans-Manhattan expressway, the part that goes through Manhattan) has private buildings over the roadway.
Do you recall how far north it was? Finding it on a map could give you a clue. For example, here is where Paris Vally Road crosses over Route 101. It does not look like a private overpass to me. It’s just that the designers didn’t see a need for a direct connection between the road and the highway. If you need to get from one to the other, use Exit 271 at Lockwood San Lucas Road about a mile north.
This is nothing unusual. In fact, I’d say that it is an essential aspect of a limited-access highway: You don’t want an exit for every single cross-street. For example, here are three overpasses that go over Route 80 in New Jersey; they don’t have an exit themselves, but there is one just to the west of them. If you want something more spread out, exits 4 and 5 of the NJ Turnpike are ten miles apart, and this overpass is about halfway between them. As it turns out, that overpass is very close to Exit 43A of Rt 295, but only if you’re a bird; driving from that spot on the Turnpike to Exit 43A is not only a circuitous route, but without a map, you’d never even know that there’s another highway nearby.
There are many more overpasses than there are overpasses with exits. A road may be important enough to carry over a freeway but not important enough to warrant an exit.
There are lots of private facilities that go over roads. Frequently pedestrian overpasses may be built and/or maintained under contract with a school district. In general, RR bridges over highways are owned and maintained by the RR but sometimes not, there will be an agreement at the time the bridge is built as to who maintains what. Then there are things like pipelines, assembly lines, and buildings which sometimes pass over the highways. Or some places have airport taxiways over highways. And nothing to do with highways, but there are even some waterway over waterway bridges in the world.
There can also be private roads such as plant access roads over highways as well. The maintenance will all be spelled out in the agreement with the highway agency. Often the major river crossings are owned by a toll authority and they may also cross over roads that to along the shore.
Depending on the highway agency’s policy, the highway agency may or may not inspect the private bridges going over their roads. Some may do so on the grounds that they want to make sure the bridge isn’t going to be spalling concrete onto the roadway below. And the highway agency would also be responsible for measuring the underclearance below the bridge.
Drove the highway north from Salt Lake City a few times - once you get into the hills, I suspect the highway bisects a lot of farms or ranches that went up both sides of the valley. I think I remember seeing a few one-lane bridges that connected the two sides.
The are lots of rancher underpasses and a few rancher overpasses I know of in New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. And I imagine there are many more I do not know scattered about the west.
The best example is the overpass located off I-25, about 20 miles south of Raton NM. Just west of Eagle Tail Mountain. You can see on Google maps that it has both south and northbound ramps. And then one end of the overpass goes to a dead end, and the other to a giant gate…So one can get off there, and drive back and forth on the bridge…an that’s it. And I imagine staying on the bridge too long would lead to some serious unpleasantness.
Access seems to be just for a few ranches, one of which must have some serious mojo. Could have been a trade for land that was given to build a NRA training center farther north up 25. Or could be the rancher acquired some naughty pictures of the governor. Those guys know how to work it.
The smaller dude type ranch is for sale. Anyone want to loan me $2,000,000?
This. Especially in rural areas, you might only see an exit every 15/20/30 miles (or more), but there are roads in the area that need to carry over the freeway.
I am not at all shocked when I see an overpass with no exit in the area where I grew up…it’s just a country road.
Here’s a nice, new overpass from nowhere to nowhere in New Mexico. I think it was built for the military, so convoys could cross 54 and the railway during training exercises without blocking the highway or worrying about trains, but that’s just conjecture. It was completed only a couple years ago.
Old-timers in the San Francisco Bay Area will surely remember the famous bridge from nowhere to nowhere, above the interchange of US 101, I-680, and I-280 in San Jose. It was to be part of that (then-incomplete) interchange, but stood uncompleted for umpty years in the 1970’s. It was completed sometime from 1981 to 1984, during a time when I was out of the area.
One day during that time, the commuters on 101 woke up to find a car sitting on top of that bridge (placed so as to be plainly visible from the 101 roadway below). For 37 years thereafter, it was a legend in the area, and the subject of endless speculation as to who had put that car there, and how.
