I'm not squeamish, but I don't think I would cross it either. They need an extra safety line across the top where one could at least hook up with a lanyard just in case the main bridge had a problem.
We have several big bridges in Jacksonville. When one is under repair, it screws up traffic for a year.
This is what I did one summer for a couple of months. Hard on my back, but I was only woman welder on the job and never let on. We all got paid twice the prevailing rate because welders were short supply and they were behind schedule. Wearing leathers all day was sure hot. We had short breaks every 30 minutes. This was about 1975 best I remember. This old photo not of the bridge I worked on, just to give you a visual of what I did.
It isn’t necessarily the designs nor the engineering that astounds me about some of these bridges. After the initial designing and the engineers have everything in print, it’s pretty much useless brainpower if someone doesn’t put it all into action. Even the swinging bridges going from mountain top to mountain top. After the main guys with the brains knew what to do, someone still had to do the grunt work and to me, a lot of it took some real intestinal fortitude along with the willingness to accomplish the nearly impossible just to build a bridge. It’s an excellent thread @Frank Sanoica! Excellent to me because it makes me remember who the real hero’s are when it comes to constructing something so monumental as a bridge, a dam, or a tall skyscraper. The bean counters and engineers should certainly be praised for their intellect but the guys who actually risk life and limb to make it happen are the guys I am in total awe of.
I just found this thread and thought I'd add my 2 cents here. Many years ago, I suffered from gephyrophobia. I lived in San Francisco at the time, and fortunately there was a panic clinic in the area, and I went through "therapy" to get rid of it. In any event, when I was finally declared non-gephyrophobic, my best friend gave me a gift of this picture of the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. It hangs in our livingroom. I think the coolest thing about this picture is the two guys fishing nearby who seem to not even notice that the bridge is being built.