Portugal just opened the world's longest suspended footbridge, and it's not for people afraid of heights

When faced with a few miles of walking around the long way or just crossing over the short way, it seems like a simple choice. If this is part of your regular commute, it becomes the natural choice.

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Fuck no
I made it 29 years without having a problem with heights. Then I was roped into helping a friend set up her theater performance in a black box theater. We went to set up lights and it was a bunch of metal grids hanging 40 some feet above the theater floor. I had been up there about an hour and suddenly something in my brain just popped and I started freaking out and getting vertigo. I had to stop because I could not handle seeing through the floor (metal grid) like that. Twenty years later and I still get that feeling around heights.

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deep into trivia here, but the reason i asked the vague question about The Myth Busters conclusion was that it too ended up vague. They eventually ended up redacting their initial “Busted” conclusion with a “Plausible”

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I would very much dislike (Joanna Lumley’s version of) a garden on a bridge, and yes, there is a barely sufficient number of pedestrian river crossings in Zone 1; but other parts of London also exist, and are entirely bridge-free east of the City.

Unless you count the walkway in the Rotherhithe tunnel (and having tried it, I don’t), there is no real walkable crossing between Tower Bridge and Dartford. Just a mostly-closed Victorian tourist tunnel and an expensive neoliberal cable car. There won’t even be pedestrian or cycle routes in the new Blackwall tunnel being pointlessly built next to the existing one.

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Oh really? Wow, I had not realized that. Interesting! I should rewatch it… sometimes their “plausible” conclusions required so many caveats as to be effectively impossible. Maybe this is one of those. That’s what I’ll tell myself so I can pretend I’m still right about this factoid. :grimacing:

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I understood both Greenwich and Woolwich foot tunnels were now open. Although I do like the views from the Woolwich ferry.

As an untrained kid I could get some alarming motion going on the Lynn Canyon bridge above. Stand about 1/3 along from either end and just bend one’s knees up and down for a while. Whoo-hoo! Then they spoiled it with some diagonal cables you can just make out in the photo: very effective at dampening the harmonic. Boooooo.

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I seem to remember that the Millennium Bridge in London was subject to lateral resonant oscillations when large groups of pedestrians walked on it. I think there was a feedback component, where the bridge swaying drove the pedestrians to move in lock step, causing the sway to increase. Engineering, eh? It is a complex business. :thinking:

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But that’s not the mechanism, the positive feedback from the oscillation itself causes everyone to be in sync with the bridge.

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Whoops! But yes. Teh Wikis article I linked to has a section about it. It’s not that people start out in step but that the oscillation synchronises them.

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Your explanation was more concise than mine :smiley:

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