(Note: A bridge’s stated weight limit isn’t the point at which it collapses, but rather an estimate by an engineer about the point at which regular loads will probably start to cause damage. This completely demands me to wonder: H ow would some other famous bridges cope with the weight of Ponts des Arts-style love? Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any kind of record of the max weight load of the Ponts des Arts online (but if any French-speaking readers know I’m wrong on that, please correct me). For a pedestrian bridge that seems… unwise. Those locks add up to equalling just shy of 400 extra people standing on the bridge at all times – or, about 12 ice cream vans, since this is a tourist attraction. To put 28 tonnes in perspective, the average European human weighs 70kg. (Seeing as other estimates I’ve seen have varied from 10 tonnes to 93 tonnes, and that pictures of the bridge show that there are so many locks on it that in some places there are layers of locks attached to other locks, this seems like a reasonable estimate that is, if anything, perhaps a touch on the conservative side.) At 75g each, that gives us roughly 28 tonnes. That gives us 150m divided by 20mm = 7,500 padlocks per row, and enough space for 25 rows (1m divided by 40mm) gives us 187,500 padlocks per side, or 375,000 across the whole bridge. I can’t find a measurement for the height of each railing, but from pictures of people walking on the bridge they look to be a touch higher than waist height. Looking at the dimensions of locks on Amazon, I’m going to say it’s reasonable to take 40mm by 20mm by 10mm as a median average of the dimensions of a standard key padlock that a tourist would be able to buy in any non-specialist shop in Paris.Ĭurrently, the bridge’s railings on both sides, for the full 150m length, are completely filled with locks. Reports have said that most of the locks on the bridge weight between 50 and 90 grams, so let’s take a neat 75g as our average.
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