Deck view looking East from point near cable anchor
Photo taken by Dan Crawford in January 2012
BH Photo #224065
Cable-stayed bridge (harp style)-- 400 ft high arched pylon with 58 cables attached to center spine of bridge. 3 lanes of traffic each way. Concrete deck approach spans.
While I will admit that the main span of this bridge is intriguing with its unusual cable arrangement, at the same time this bridge demonstrates what is wrong with modern bridge aesthetics (in the rare cases where modern bridges have aesthetics at all). Take a look at the approach spans. While an effort was made to make the main span look interesting, the approach spans couldn't have been made more plain and ugly if you tried. The piers are like what we use in Michigan for freeway overpasses and the approach spans appear to be some sort of pre-stressed box beam or girder, I can't tell.
Compare this bridge to something like the St. Johns Bridge in Oregon to see a truly aesthetic bridge. From the base of the anchorage to the tip of the tower, and from abutment to abutment the St. Johns Bridge has evidence of painstaking effort to provide an aesthetically pleasing bridge.
The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge would have looked a lot nicer with say concrete deck arch approach spans.
I pasted this originally in December of 2014, deleted the original today, and reposted an edited version.
As I understand it, this bridge is just a concrete deck bridge with DECORATIVE cable arrays. TXDOT did that to cut costs.
Back then, I felt like neither of the others would be built with Calatrava effects. The Calatrava effects on 3rd one was cancelled. The second one IS PURELY decorative and scaled back.