A few posts back, there is a quote from some engineer that said the bridge is really just a truss bridge, with the elements already in place to support it. The tower and the long diagonals were just for show. (So this guy says....)
If so - that seems really stupid too. Like the 1% or whatever it is that has to be spent on art-work at some of these jobs. At the Sea-Tac (Seattle) third runway (finished a few years ago) there is a retaining wall with millions of dollars worth of engravings on the wall - eagles, killer whales, mountains, etc.
It is along a back service road in the restricted area. The closest the public can get to it are some residential roads on the far side of the airport. You can get peeks of it through the trees. It is still about 500 feet away though.
It is the high tensile strength of rebar and extreme web reinforcement rods that allows one to use concrete simply to keep the steel elements in place. On the upper load-bearing paved surface, the compressive strength of concrete comes into play as having structural value.
But even in pillars, steel rods and spiral reinforcement is used to keep the concrete from crumbling under the tensile forces deriving from Poisson's ratio as applied to compressive stress gradients.
If that means anything to the layman.