A lonesome bridge along I-70 that went nowhere is gone for good

If you drive I-70 as often as I do, you’ll start to memorize its quirks: the curves where you have to ease off the gas, the traffic patterns, the Royals logo off the Benton curve. But chances are you never noticed a bridge with no destination. In fact, it connected nothing to nothing much longer than it ever connected anything to anything.

For the purpose of this story, we’ll call this structure the Bridge to Nowhere. It was located off I-70 between Indiana Avenue and Truman Road along the Benton curve. You couldn’t quite spot it from the interstate, but if you ever took Benton Boulevard, you passed right by it. According to Missouri Department of Transportation Assistant District Engineer Jeffrey Hardy, the bridge was built in the early 1960s and remained in use until 1980.

“If you were on Benton, you could get onto eastbound I-70 by taking that ramp,” Hardy says. “After World War II, there was a big migration of people from the urban core to the suburbs, growing a need for ramps like this one.”

The Bridge to Nowhere’s biggest flaw, when it was functional, was that it was a left-entrance ramp. Although the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Highway Safety Manual doesn’t strictly prohibit left ramps, it does address their safety concerns. In early 1980, there was a push to remove ramps in Kansas City that were either low-volume or considered unsafe due to their left-side access to the freeway. 

With that, the Bridge to Nowhere’s ramp onto the interstate was removed, but the structure remained. And until recently, it served a surprising purpose.

“We were going to tear the bridge down over 10 years ago, but the University of Missouri was doing a study on it to evaluate how long a bridge would last without putting a lot of salt and vehicles on it,” Hardy says. That data helped engineers understand how concrete and steel structures age in relatively untouched conditions, which is valuable insight for infrastructure planning. A Missouri DOT analysis of nearly 40 years of bridge data found that salt speeds up deterioration more than any other factor, often cutting a bridge’s life in half. In other words, the Bridge to Nowhere gave them a rare before-and-after comparison they could never have purposely recreated.

While nothing remains of the Bridge to Nowhere, which was officially demolished this past May as part of the I-70 rebuilding project, a small part of the era still remains: “At the [former] Troost ramp, you can still see the retaining wall,” Hardy says.  

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