Toledo's I-280 Veterans' Glass City Skyway: A Precast Concrete Landmark Bridge: Fid-Bau Portal

Toledo's I-280 Veterans' Glass City Skyway: A Precast Concrete Landmark Bridge

Bonzon, Wade S.

The new Veterans' Glass City Skyway in Toledo, Ohio incorporates many unique structural and aesthetic features. It was constructed completely from the "top-down" by cantilevering in one direction from the main pylon over the main shipping channel of the Maumee River. All precast segments were delivered over the completed back spans, allowing uninterrupted shipping to the busy Port of Toledo. The stays are the largest of any known cable-stayed bridge in the world, with up to 156 strands. The bridge is the first in the United States to use low maintenance stainless steel stay sheathing and the first to be designed with the new cradle system for passing the stay cables through the pylon. The stay cradle provides an efficient means of transferring cable forces to the pylon concrete, eliminating the need for anchorages in the pylon and the associated additional rebar, post-tensioning, or steel anchorage box. The highly efficient force transfer also allowed the cross-sectional shape of the pylon to incorporate, for the first time in any cable-stayed bridge in the world, glass panels and multicolored LED lighting for the upper 196 ft of the pylon above deck level. The glass panels and LED aesthetic lighting represent less than 1% of the total project cost and are expected to require only minimal maintenance during the bridge's service life. However, the aesthetic impact of these first-of-a-kind features is extremely high, and the bridge is expected to become a new landmark not only for Toledo but for the United States.