There’s a bridge near where I live, identified as “Farm Rd”. It looks like any other bridge over the interstate but I’d never heard of that road before. Generally any road around here that would warrant a bridge over the interstate is one I’d have heard of. One day I looked satellite images of it and on one end it immediately ends in a grassy field, and the other side is, unsurprisingly, what looks like a working farm.
My guess is when the interstate was built it bisected private farmland and the bridge was built so the landowner could still access the rest of their property. There’s no “going” around any other way for many miles.
I always wondered how I could find out for sure and this article gave me some ideas on how to even begin searching.
There's a curious one lane bridge[1] over I-40 outside of Raleigh that leads to a gravel road that serves about 4 houses, and then leads into the back side of Umstead State Park. We always joke about it being the "bridge to nowhere" and ponder "who had the political connections to make that happen?"
But I imagine it's something like you were saying: probably when I-40 was built, the land acquisition process resulted in those homes being cut off from everywhere else, unless that bridge was built. And probably it was cheaper / easier / more politically viable to build the bridge than buy out the remaining land-owners.
Or maybe there was more to it. This area is also adjacent to RDU airport: a lot of the land you can see near "Old Reedy Creek Road" on the map, north of I-40, belongs to the airport, even though it is undeveloped (aside from bandit MTB trails). I suppose the argument for the bridge might have involved providing better access to the airport, then or in the future, for emergency crews or something of that nature. The additional access to Umstead Park I wouldn't expect to be a big factor, because the next exit down on I-40 is already one of the two major entrances to the park.
Anyway it's always interesting to look at stuff like this and wonder how/why certain decisions were made.
My guess is when the interstate was built it bisected private farmland and the bridge was built so the landowner could still access the rest of their property. There’s no “going” around any other way for many miles.
I always wondered how I could find out for sure and this article gave me some ideas on how to even begin searching.