Mr. Calatrava, who designed the PATH station in Lower Manhattan that admirers called visionary and detractors called way too expensive, has a reputation for breaking budgets. Compared to projects like that one in New York and the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, the Venice bridge was a bargain, costing €11.6 million, though it was originally estimated to cost €7 million.

In Venice, Mr. Calatrava’s bridge is hardly the only victim of an out-of-control excess of tourists. The city has hired “decorum” police to keep tourists from eating on monuments, signs advise them not to dive in the canals and new technology is being used to get an accurate count on how many millions of tourists actually visit each year.

Many of them arrive at Venice’s train station, and it is the luggage they wheel over a large canal that has taken a toll on Mr. Calatrava’s bridge, especially on the glass panels that form part of its steps.

Mr. Calatrava’s original plans estimated that the steps would require replacement every 20 years. But within four years after its opening, the city needed to substitute eight of them for a cost of €36,000, according to the ruling. And like a footbridge with a glass tile surface that Mr. Calatrava designed in Bilbao, Spain, the Venice bridge also drew complaints for its lack of grip. When it rained, its sloped glass floor turned into a starchitect’s Slip ’N Slide.

“It wasn’t hard to imagine, from the beginning and in practice, that the elevated rate of falls would yield a more than proportionate risk of breaking the glass,” read the ruling.