As the university grew, traffic on Southwest Eighth Street, along the northern edge of campus, became one of its problems. About 4,000 students lived in neighboring Sweetwater, across the busy eight-lane street. University students also work with the local elementary school in Sweetwater, which in turn sends children to the art museum on campus.

A pedestrian bridge became necessary for safety.

“This was a good project,” Dr. Rosenberg said Friday. “This was a project that spoke to our desire to build bridges. When the board hired me, I told them, ‘If you give me a pile of rocks, I’m going to build a bridge, not a wall.’ This was about neighborliness and collaboration.”

Experts in accelerated bridge construction, in which bridges are prefabricated and quickly moved into place, said it was particularly unfortunate that the collapse occurred at F.I.U. The university is known for its expertise in the field and has attracted top international scholars as Ph.D. students.

The Accelerated Bridge Construction University Transportation Center at F.I.U., a federally financed research center that received a round of $10 million in government funding in 2016, gathers, organizes and distributes information about the timesaving method.

In addition to sponsoring industry conferences in Miami every two years, the center also hosts monthly online seminars that are viewed regularly by about 4,000 people, according to Michael P. Culmo, an expert in accelerated bridge construction.

“They do play a key role in the field,” said Mr. Culmo, the chief technical officer for CME Associates, an engineering firm based in Mansfield, Conn.