But it could. Now, more than a decade into the Peace Bridge Expansion Project, this region has stumbled its way through four different design-selecting processes - commissioned designers, design charette, public workshops with votes, and now a juried competition - without yet selecting a design.

Fundamental bridge questions remain unanswered. The latest process involves a jury with community representatives from both sides of the border. But the efficiency-versus-elegance debate still rages, and the jury's technical members worry about costs. Reaching consensus has proven elusive, and reaching a conclusion may be equally difficult.

Some years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Tom Toles drew a Niagara "signature" bridge incorporating elements from most known bridge construction types, with cables spelling out the phrase, "we don't know what we're doing."

Do we, now?

There is some hope. Design decisions that once were closely held by the public authority running the Peace Bridge are more open now, with years of public input and a decision-making "partnering group." It involves not just the bridge authority, but the elected governments on both sides of the Niagara River. And although some major bridge programs go smoothly, a decade is by no means an unheard-of delay for a project of this scale and importance.

In the meantime, the delay hasn't triggered the two predicted disasters at the start of this process - the Peace Bridge didn't hit full traffic capacity by 1999, and chunks of its deck didn't fall into the river by 2004. Instead, the delay has had two other major effects, one good and one very bad:

• Advances in materials and in the way they are used have opened much wider design possibilities, from longer suspended spans to slanted pylons to curving bridge decks, than were available to designers when this process started.

• A recent spike in materials costs could add millions to a project that already had grown from an estimated $77 million in 1994 to an estimated $320 million last year.

The challenge could be to use new designs to help offset costs. Or it could be to find the money to let imaginations soar. That's a very real choice, and it's being faced all over the world.

A sense of place

It's part of an overall realization in planning circles of a truth instinctive to most of us: Place is important. To use some current buzzwords, communities are now holding "envisioning" or "place-making" sessions as part of the process of planning their futures - including transportation infrastructure, and especially bridges.

Where transportation facilities once were considered almost entirely as functional necessities - generic and plain vanilla - that's changing, said Robert Dunphy, senior resident for transportation and infrastructure at Washington's Urban Land Institute.

"There's a rediscovery of the value that design adds to a project," he added. "And another thing that's happened is that some of the great designers have turned their attention to bridges."

Here's a tale of two bridges.

The first is a cautionary tale, set in California. It happened in 1989, about the time former Buffalo Mayor James D. Griffin commissioned a feasibility study for a new Niagara bridge that his consultants, interestingly enough, estimated at $300 million. The Loma Prieta earthquake shook the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and collapsed part of its eastern span.

It wasn't until 1996 that California decided to retrofit the western span and build a new eastern half. State highway engineers preferred a "road on stilts" viaduct, but in public hearings during 1998, the community let them know it wanted a dramatic design, even if tolls had to pay for it.

What it got, later that year, was a compromise approved by the regional transportation commission - mostly viaduct, but with a cable-stayed span tied to a tall suspension tower as its easternmost section.

Then even that compromise was faced with compromise. The single bid for the cable-stayed portion came in far higher than expected (the whole 2.2-mile project has soared from $1.3 billion to $5.9 billion and completion has slipped from 2004 to at least 2012).

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called for scrapping the tower portion - on which $45 million had already been spent - in favor of a simpler and cheaper causeway like the one highway engineers had wanted. State legislators also rallied to the cause, arguing that beauty was a frill a cash-strapped government couldn't afford.

This, in a region where the nearby Golden Gate Bridge has had more than a little to do with the image and economy of its city. Is there a place where the argument that bridge appearance is irrelevant makes less sense than in San Francisco?

This time, the highway engineers balked and recommended keeping the tower. Political wrangling continued for months, at a construction-delay cost estimated by Caltrans at $400,000 a day. Then, this summer, the state approved toll hikes from $3 to $4 - and this Aug. 1, the tower portion contract was reopened to bidding in hopes competition could make it cheaper.

Innovative thinking

The second tale is more uplifting. Literally.

It involves the highway from Paris to Barcelona, and a bottleneck near the southern French river town of Millau. In 1988 Michel Virlogeux, head of the French transport agency's bridge division, was tasked with realigning the highway in that region. He was working on traditional ideas when one of his engineers asked why the road had to drop into the deep valley of the River Tarn at all.

It was a radical thought. The cable-stayed viaduct would have to be more than a mile and a half long with its road nearly 900 feet above the valley floor. Virlogeux ran with it.

Eventually, his concept - on a scale that makes its massive piers, the tallest one higher than the Eiffel Tower, appear airy - was refined into reality by star British architect Lord Norman Foster after the government opened the idea to a design competition.

Virlogeux left the state agency to partner with Foster on the project, and the record-breaking Millau Viaduct opened to critical acclaim (and thousands of cars) last December. It had been built in just three years, for about $676 million, all of it privately financed.

There are other stories, of course. The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge already has emerged as both a civic icon for Boston and a symbol of the staggeringly expensive "Big Dig."

Charleston, S.C., recently celebrated the opening of an iconic cable-stayed Cooper River Bridge that earned national awards for extensive community outreach during the design and construction process.

Even in the Lake Erie neighborhood, work is progressing on an innovative Glass City Skyway bridge in Toledo, Ohio, that features heritage-linked illuminated glass panels in its pylon, and Cleveland is thinking about a signature I-90 bridge near Jacobs Field.

In recent years, there has been an explosion in bridge building and innovative bridge design in Asia, spurred by expanding economies, and in Europe, fueled there largely by European Union financing of attempts to link European transportation networks together.

Among the most dramatic projects, aside from Millau and a spate of sculptural bridges in Spain, was the Rion-Antirion Bridge, which stitched the Peloponnese to central Greece in time for the crossing of the Athens Olympics torch - and which may pave the way toward a planned Messina Bridge linking Sicily and Italy, and eventually to a long-envisioned span across the Straits of Gibraltar.

We need a dream

Can't we catch some of that energy?

It's worth noting that two internationally renowned bridge designers who already have worked on our bridge project have ties to some of those bridges - T.Y. Lin to the Oakland Bay bridge, although most of his innovative work has been in China, and Christian Menn to the Zakim-Bunker Hill Bridge. In addition, the current bridge superstar - Santiago Calatrava - was involved in an earlier "SuperSpan" counter-proposal here.

But the Peace Bridge Authority didn't hire a "starchitect" and turn him loose. From the start, the Buffalo-Fort Erie project has been not only strictly constrained, but subjected to sudden policy shifts.

The choice, at least at this stage of the journey, lies with 20 jurors - 16 civic and four technical, equally appointed by each nation - tasked with delivering a design recommendation to the Partnering Group for final decision.

Here's hoping they all can dream. Here's hoping they see financing as a challenge, not just a roadblock. Here's hoping they don't follow California's "safe road at cheapest cost" route, and drive this project onto that visionary path in France instead.

Why? Because we're building this bridge for generations of people who will live here, not just for truckers and travelers who must cross this span. We are building - whatever we choose - not just a symbol of what this region is, but of what it hopes to be. We are not just crossing a river; we are crossing a threshold.

What we build will tell the world whether we welcome what lies beyond - or fear it.