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The issue with pedestrian bridges is that unless the road they cross is a freeway, they make the quality of life worse for pedestrians (and better for drivers) compared to a crosswalk, by adding an unnecessary vertical component to the journey. The bridge only helps pedestrians if the baseline is no crosswalk. Assuming that there is a pedestrian route crossing the road with sufficient traffic to justify building the bridge, this is not a sensible assumption. Pedestrians have the same right to cross a road safely that cars in a cross street do, and everyone agrees that cars in a cross street are entitled to some kind of arrangement allowing them to cross at-grade within a reasonable waiting time (generally 30 seconds typical, 60 seconds maximum) - usually a traffic light.
A crosswalk costs less than a pedestrian bridge - even if you install a push-button operated traffic light to fairly allocate priority between cars and pedestrians (as opposed to a zebra crossing where pedestrians have priority at all times). The additional cost to build the bridge has negative benefit to pedestrians (climbing the steps takes longer than waiting for the green man), so it isn't pedestrian infrastructure.
If your response is "But the crosswalk would never be built, but the bridge might be" then you have to ask why. The reason is probably "because it is politically impossible to ask cars to wait for pedestrians the way they wait at red lights for cars in cross streets". If your community is serious about that, then I suppose the bridge does benefit pedestrians, in much the same way that a mugger benefits you if he lets you keep your ID while he takes your cash and credit cards.
Unless the vertical component is excessive (e.g. several ramps), I don't think it's "unnecessary". The pedestrian bridges in Las Vegas have a simple staircase and elevator and they get plenty of foot traffic.
Okay, but this conflicts with many of the positions espoused by urbanists I've seen that say that pedestrians and cars are different and therefore should be treated differently in some respects. E.g. urbanists ridicule when pedestrians are told to make sure they look both ways when crossing the road, even though when cars cross the road, they are taught (at least in drivers' ed) to look both ways too. The standard here doesn't seem to be consistently applied.
In any case, underpasses (which don't have a vertical component) are ridiculed by urbanists too. They also ridicule even at-grade solutions like HAWK signals.
This analogy does not follow. No one is being "robbed" here in any metaphorical sense.
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