Woodbridge Bridge Bridge Contest Bridge Wooden Bridge

This bridge was built in a collaboration between 3 students. The primary author is in 12th grade, while the other two collaborators are in 9th grade and 11th grade respectively.

This bridge was made with the intention of increasing accessibility for the community of Woodbridge.

The location we chose to hypothetically build a bridge at is a busy intersection where pedestrian crossing can be very dangerous due to reckless, impatient, or distracted drivers. Improving the accessibility and safety of this area is very important because many students cross this pedestrian crossing on the daily to get to school. In addition, a handful of senior citizens cross as well due to the intersection being close to a senior center.

I myself have nearly gotten potentially hit or run over multiple times when crossing whilst the pedestrian crossing light signaled me to walk.

By building this bridge, we can help students, senior citizens, and pedestrians in general feel safer crossing the street.

Supplies

-TinkerCad

-Google Maps

Step 1: Planning

The first thing done was planning. There were many factors to consider in the planning process. For one, we needed to consider if there was space to put a bridge there, how high the bridge needed to be, and if the height of the bridge would affect how long we would need to make our bridge.

We struggled to get the exact length of the sidewalk and the street because it would be too dangerous to measure with all the people/cars/bicycles around, and we didn't want to block anyone's paths. So, we were forced to use a combination of estimates and assumptions to get our measurements.

Using Google Earth, we found that the pedestrian crossing is about 10 meters long.

Using our TinkerCad model, our bridge is 4 meters wide and about 5.43 meters tall.

By law, the minimum width for sidewalks is 8 feet, so we will assume that the sidewalk is 8 feet wide.

Step 2: Finding Inspiration

At first, we decided to model our bridge after the bridges at our school. However, all of the bridges at our school are connected to the ground by stairs and there is an elevator system for people who cannot use the stairs. However, our bridge is in a spot where there would be a lot of bikers and also elderly people, so we decided to make it arched, and modeled the shape after another nearby bridge. We still wanted to keep the aesthetic of the bridges at our school, so we decided to keep the color and wooden plank design that our school bridges have.

Step 3: Modeling

We then created this in tinkercad. We also added the existing traffic lights and road sign to our bridge, because cars still need to travel under the bridge there and there’s no space for both those on a separate pole and our bridge.