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It’s the new City of Calgary riddle: what costs $5.9 million, weighs hundreds of tonnes and is about 11 centimetres shy of being useful?

A pedestrian overpass that’s supposed to go across Shaganappi Trail, but instead is sitting alongside the road.

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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Calgary spent $5.9 million on a new pedestrian bridge. But concrete support pillars 11 cm too far apart Back to video

City contractors tried to lift the bridge’s steel arch onto its abutments last weekend — complete with three days of traffic closures — but the connecting beams beneath the bridge were about 10 to 12.5 centimetres apart from fitting snugly into brackets on the concrete pillars at either side, city spokesman Sean Somers said Wednesday.

Oopsie, as they might say in the construction biz.

“This is not something we see very often,” Somers said.

To fix it, crews will either have to adjust the pillars or the connectors underneath the steel bridge itself.

A bridge that was supposed to open this spring now has an uncertain due date, though the city expects the delay to be as little as a couple weeks. When complete, it will offer a pedestrian link between Northland Village Shopping Centre and the Canadian Tire on the other side of Shaganappi, just north of Crowchild Trail.