This is actually part of the PROBLEM - with so many bridges on the "worst possible category" it becomes a bridge who cried wolf scenario. There is no way to highlight "yeah this one is going to fall down tomorrow" if the worst you can do is mark it "this bridge bad like 42k others".
You need some form of a "stop ship" where inspectors get some number of "no way, close this entirely" that they can use without repercussions or something.
I think this leans on a thing that I think of as the "law of average quality." The belief that there's some mark, near the middle, and things below that mark are bad, and things above that mark are good. It's something that is only true if you're comparing things against themselves. If there are any external goals for the things being discussed, almost everything can be bad (and correspondingly, almost everything can be good.)
I feel like this thought process leads to the "worst possible category" containing 42k bridges. The construction of the categories was based around whether the bridge is safe, and this category says "the bridge is not safe." It's when you put it off long enough, and let the infrastructure deteriorate long enough, that you start going "which is the most unsafe though?" Or, "is a safety factor even necessary? They are by definition a >1.0 factor applied to what we think is safe." Then, "one in a hundred year events" or "once in a decade events." Eventually it's "hasn't collapsed yet!"
The fact that the list got that big means our problem isn't prioritization, our problem is failing to repair bridges. Commit to and budget for repairing 42k bridges, then prioritize where you start.
They sort of do have that power. They have the ability to lower the max vehicle weight and eventually it gets lowered to where no real traffic can go over it. Grady talked about it in the video.
There is a catch-22 for such a judgement call. As bridges generally weigh far more than the traffic they carry, there isn't much room between a bridge that is too dangerous for traffic and one that is too dangerous for anything, including repair work.
There's a road near me that's been replaced by a large 4 lane state route. There's almost no reason to drive it as there are no houses or farm access. The bridge is being completely replaced. The road is closed during construction, and I think the only people impacted by it are the recreational bikers. A boondoggle while other bridges around the country are in dangerous disrepair. I wish we knew there was a sensible prioritization that was published for review by we the taxpayers.
Yes! I want a cost benefit analysis and to ask every stakeholder imaginable for any sort of road repair or expansion. The fact that not every repair or expansion has a single improvement for non car users is pitiful.
We need to hold road infrastructure to the same consideration as we do transit and rail. If we didn’t give it unlimited funding, then it would already be doing this.
We are wasting trillions and losing so much economic growth by doubling down on a bad investment year after year for decades. Imagine if this money was put into education or healthcare or transit. We’d actually have a net benefit!
> Imagine if this money was put into education or healthcare or transit. We’d actually have a net benefit!
Based on the evidence, it's hard to imagine that lack of money is the problem with those three things.
K-12 education in particular has seen more and more money spent over the decades while the number of students, teachers, and student outcomes have stayed more or less constant (the extra money mostly goes to administrators to administrate the extra money). Higher ed has gotten famously more expensive while delivering a poorer product, with grade inflation and recently a focus on worthless social activism diluting what it means to have a college degree at all.
On healthcare, the US already spends close to one-fifth of its GDP on it. Its per capita spend is over 50% higher than the next-highest country, Switzerland. And what do we have to show for this, other than an obesity rate exceeding one-third the population and diminishing life expectancies? I don't know how more money could possibly help this situation.
Transit only makes sense in a few cities (largely due to idiotic zoning that prevents the kind of densities that would enable transit) and even then, if you look at things like NYC's East Side Access project, it would be hard-pressed for a public works project to spend taxpayer money less efficiently. And to truly improve the transit experience would require a concomitant improvement in the social fabric, which is its own set of problems.
A big part of that is who pays - state and federal dollars that are unused go away, so they often find a program that can use it, even if it's not the best use of funds locally.
Local roads often don't qualify, but state and federal highways do.
Those states also have some of the fewest bridges, with the exception of Texas, which has the most of all states, and double the second place state (Ohio). That said, Ohio is 41 times smaller…
So many ways to dice this information and I don’t even live in the US.
Texas is about 6 times bigger than Ohio. Texas is approximately 678,052 sq km, while Ohio is approximately 106,056 sq km.
The population of Texas is around 25.1 million people compared to 11.5 million in Ohio, a difference of 13.6 million people. That means about 2 times population wise.
I don't know by which size metric it is that ohio is 41 times smaller than texas?
Also texas has 683,533 lane miles of road vs ohio's 262,492 and a GDP of $2,563,508m vs ohio's $872,748m. Seems like they aren't putting that land mass to good use.
"Averages" is doing heavy lifting in GP's statement. It's a vast state, after all, and how meaningful is an average between the climates of Houston and El Paso?
I'm not sure about anyone else, but I'm pretty sure our bridges should be something considered important enough to keep maintained. :(
> 36 percent of all U.S. bridges (over 222,000 spans) require major repair work or replacement. Placed end‐to‐end, these structures span over 6,100 miles – and would take over 110 hours to cross at an average speed of 55‐miles‐per‐hour.
The Washington, D.C.-based American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) is a non-partisan federation whose primary goal is to aggressively grow and protect transportation infrastructure investment
After reading the measument rules, it is… complicated. From what I can gather, it seem that if any of the components (deck, culverts, sub/superstructure, waterways, etc) receive a ‘poor’ rating, the whole structure is marked as structurally deficient. It also factors in things like the current and expected traffic patterns and mainability.
Yes, but as illustrated by the original article/video, bridges are designed as a total system. One of the major causes of the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse was certainly the deficient drainage caused by blocked drains.
Bridges (and buildings) are designed as systems. Water management is one of the biggest headaches in civil engineering - poor performance of any subsystem with a water management role is a legitimate cause for concern.
So the industry's rating system maps this bridge - totally fucked, key structural members rusted away entirely, others with large, clearly visible holes right through important points, weakened to the point it ended up falling down - to "structurally deficient" and then maps "structurally deficient" to "not necessarily unsafe" ?
Kinda makes me think George Carlin was on to something with his hate of soft, euphemistic language.
That's one of the points in the video: the paperwork tends to obscure the state of the system to decision makers. It's easy for the bridge inspectors (or even a random member of the public) to see that it needs to be closed down and repaired, but it's not what the decision-makers see: they see a 100-page report with a long list of action items, many of which are not actually incredibly urgent, much like every other bridge they get inspected. It makes it difficult to actually get a good sense of where the bigger problems are. (of course it should actually be the case that they are on top of everything that is highlighted in the inspections, but that's expensive and it seems like no-one wants to pay for it)
That's related, but it's not my point. Saying "decision-makers miss details in 100-page reports" makes it sound like the report is merely too thorough, and the inspectors did too good a job.
My point is the report's summary could have said "This bridge will fall down within 3 years" instead of obscuring the with vague, watered-down jargon like "structurally deficient"
The problem is the inspectors aren't even in a position to make a judgement call like that: they're given 100 pages of boxes to fill in and they have to color inside those lines. It's a systemic issue of how the jobs are split up and the communication works between them. (see the fact that the reviews did indeed trigger some work to be done that would actually make that judgement call... by an engineering firm that never actually saw the bridge and in part for that reason screwed up the call).
Managing structurally deficient bridges is more problematic in places with winter or at least more varied weather (like Pennsylvania).
Just like this bridge, the big problem is that something happens and degradation switches from "slow but manageable" to "Oh, shit, suddenly that beam is gone and this bridge might collapse".
Same stuff for the Genoa, Italy bridge (Ponte Morandi). Everyone running on that would feel vibrations and "repairs" were just lipstick on a ugly face, until it finally collapsed, with 43 dead.
Surprisingly, or not so, no one was found guilty, not even the inspectors that didn't report the ongoing damages, just because "it would be too costly to rebuild it, and profits of the highway company (1) in charge of it would be zero".
(1) the company name is Atlantia, fully owned at the time by the Benetton family, yes those of the sweater chain
As the video states this was flagged by inspections 14 times over 7 years or so.
There's even inspection reports of one of the cross supports rusted through and disconnected, a cable taking some of the strain. At the very least the bridge should have just been closed, as unsafe.
Warning in this context means something obvious to the unsuspecting user that collapse is imminent. Like a building creaking or buckling minutes or hours before finally giving way.
In engineering terms thats a mode of collapse, thing, not about people actually warning.
When we do design, we're generally designing things so that if it fails it does so in a way that doesn't suddenly all collapse at once, but first deforms for a while so people can get away.
Still ridiculous, though. Do doctors in Italy go to jail for giving false negative cancer diagnoses? Can I sue the weather man when I get struck by lightning when they said there's no chance of rain? Maybe next time the public should interpret the seismographs themselves.
Edit: It was eventually overturned [1]. Still, a shocking indictment of the court system.
> Still ridiculous, though. Do doctors in Italy go to jail for giving false negative cancer diagnoses?
If there were strong indications of cancer and a doctor blatantly ignored it? An argument could be made that's negligence causing death.
Clearly some degree of negligence is absolutely criminal when people's lives are on the line. Maybe you don't agree where that line was drawn in this specific case, but that's not an argument that no such line exists.
Negligence means everything would have been fine if everyone involved did their duty. So I gave cases where people did their duty, got it wrong, and weren't negligent. You can imagine scenarios where they were negligent because they didn't do their duties, but I can assure you they were not since these were my imagined scenarios. In the case of these scientists who did their duty to the best of their abilities, this wasn't negligence, full stop.
I'm asking because I've been in standstil traffic (in my car) on the Lisbon "golden gate" type bridge and that thing was freaking bouncing up and down from traffic on other lanes.
Interestingly, the 25 of April Bridge in Lisbon was made by the American Bridge Company, same as the Bay Bridge, but not the Golden Gate.
And yes, it's normal. That bridge is very well maintained (there's a whole team there working daily, afaik, and I've witnessed many interventions in the past).
Now that you mention it, the diagonal braces on the piers (no idea how they're actually called) look very similar to the Bay Bridge. But to the casual observer, the number of piers and the color look more like the Golden Gate bridge, plus that's by far the better known one, so I'm not surprised it got this nickname...
Trains cross bridges easily as they're either balanced with each half on each side, or half on and half on ground. And other time's just between these stable points. Furthermore, trains run on tracks which reduces chance of turning acceleration.
Railways work well in the center of bridges. One bridge that violates this principle is the Manhattan Bridge; it was built before we had fancy engineering simulations or much experience with railway suspension bridges at all, and so the lower deck is a pair of railway tracks on either side of a roadway.
This unusual design is very stressful on the bridge and has resulted in expensive rehabilitation programs.
The thing about floating bridges is they don't need to span a waterway. The just need to link the part where getting onto the bridge then the bridge itself move to the exit section.
Floating bridges also don't necessarily need to have fixed points to load and unload. With suitable stabilisation and propulsion, they should be able to move to any number of loading and unloading points. We could have a floating bridge per train, vehicle, or any unit or set of users.
there will be a rail link across a floating bridge in seattle opening in 2025.
it was supposed to open earlier, but the contractor messed up the concrete pour and is fixing it at their own cost. but that doesn't have much to do with the fundamentals of the floating bridge itself.
But it's true that big structures are often designed to move as a way to deal with forces. It's much better than something firm that doesn't move until it snaps.
I'm not sure you can diagnose it much from feeling vibrations if running. As an aside I don't remember it being open to pedestrians - I used to drive it occasionally.
Many western countries in general do not care for routine maintenance of
infrastructure / buildings / water lines / busses.
Norway has to be among the worst.
It is not fun and glorious for a political administration to set aside
$$$$ every year that will just go to people doing boring work that the
voters will not be impressed with.
You dont see politicians "Under my administration we painted XX buildings, we did need maintenance of YY bridges, we replaced ZZ parts of the railway that would become problematic with time.
Rather:
"Under my administration we opened up a new large hospital (because the other had near 0 maintannce for decades), we built 2 new bridges etc"
> You dont see politicians "Under my administration we painted XX buildings...
That's just bad politicking then.
"Under my administration we hired hundreds of workers in Anytown who can proudly say they worked to maintain this city's infrastructure and provide a future for not only their kids but all of our kids. Their paychecks put food on the table and money into the local economy."
"If you don't want to pay taxes then who's gonna pay for the roads?"
Apparently, nobody pays for it either way. It's astounding to me how little tax money goes into paying for infrastructure.
In 2023 the US federal government spent $44.8 billion on infrastructure and transferred $81.5 billion to the states. That's $126.3 billion out of a $6.1 trillion budget. ('Only' $4.4 trillion in revenue though.)
Most infrastructure is paid for by states and cities, not via federal transfers. Your quote is actively deceptive, you literally cut out the second part of the same source here[1]:
> The federal government spent $44.8 billion on infrastructure in 2023 and transferred an additional $81.5 billion to states. In 2021, state and local governments spent $218.5 billion on transportation and infrastructure, excluding federal government transfers.
That's true, but states collect a lot of tax revenue themselves. In 2022 they collected $3.66 trillion.[0] the federal government collected $4.97 trillion in the same timeframe.[1]
Also note (a few rows down the table)[2] that the US government spends more than it collects in taxes. In 2022 the expenditures added up to $9.64 trillion.
The vast majority of the budget is just transfers from one person to another. (Social security, welfare, medicaid, etc.) Doesn’t make much more sense to compare this to infrastructure spending than it makes to compare the cost of maintenance on the bank building to the total value of the payments it processes.
Having localities pay from local tax money seems like it would focus money on expenditures that the people that use them and pay for them will approve of with their own skin in the game. There are some interstate highways that serve multiple localities, but these should be the minority, right?
A lot of road infrastructure funding at the town/city level can disproportionately go to wear/tear/usage by people/trucks that don't live in the town and the taxpayers don't benefit (in fact often the opposite). It makes more sense at the state level especially if you factor out interstates and in fact that tends to be how things are handled much of the time in the US.
Most “foreign” aid, especially military aid, is is spent within the “donor” country. Japan is the most extreme in this regard, followed by the USA.
And, like maintenance: foreign aid can avoid local problems, e.g. stabilizing countries in central America can reduce the incentive for people to flee to the US (which for most people is a distant plan C over staying where they are or moving a short distance away).
Its grift. Why does the US have to spend money on military aid to first world countries, even if a very sizable chunk is spent on American weaponry?
That money could be spent on maintenance rather than fattening our MIC.
NGOs are similar. In theory they sound good, the leaders can pull sizable salaries, eclipsing any congresspersons earnings and they are incentivized to keep the bad thing happening—if they solved the problem their reason to be would cease.
To understand why the US government spends so much on rich countries, you can’t just think in economic terms, since that’s not what why the US government is doing it.
The reason is geopolitical. It is seen as necessary to give money to allies to prop up their military so the US hegemony can be maintained. Adversaries (China, Russia, Iran) need to be made afraid not only of US might, but also of Allies’ might. So the US doesn’t wait around for those countries to spend on their military on their own, or god forbid to realign their alliances based on their spending. Checks it is.
It would be ideal if US allies would spend more on their militaries, but the last time a US President insisted on that he was mocked mercilessly.
But contrary to popular belief, the MIC isn’t that fat. They are mostly public companies - you can check out their profits yourself. Here’s one: https://valustox.com/NOC
Their margins tend to be small. Their revenues are incredibly steady (they’re pretty much government departments). Staying ready for war like this is actually a wise course of action - it would be catastrophic to have to ramp up in the next emergency like in WW2.
The military is not exactly ready for war, though. Shipbuilding capacity is greatly diminished and the Navy has massive issues with most of its design and procurement programs. Other services have issues too, though not as severe.
The military is in desperate need of more new contractors like Anduril and SpaceX to provide competition for the incumbents, as well as stronger collaboration with allies like having Japanese shipyards build some of our ships.
Anduril and SpaceX will probably be very good for the MIC. But the incumbents aren't doing too badly - they're currently supplying a proxy war against one of the US's major rivals.
The programs and systems may not be perfect but at least there are programs and systems.
> It would be ideal if US allies would spend more on their militaries, but the last time a US President insisted on that he was mocked mercilessly.
I think the mockery was over how he transactionally framed it rather than the principle itself. But TBH do we really want European countries to rearm? After centuries of fighting they quieted down after outsourcing it to the US. And since they weren't fighting that outsourcing wasn't even that expensive. I am sure it was cheaper to have all those US troops supporting NATO countries than to get drawn into yet another war over there.
> Staying ready for war like this is actually a wise course of action - it would be catastrophic to have to ramp up in the next emergency like in WW2.
It's like insurance -- you hope that it's a deadweight loss but pay for it because it's cheaper than holding the risk yourself. And I do think the western countries overdid it in regards to downsizing after the end of the cold war.
I'm not sure there's that much military aid to first world countries. Where there is like with Israel I think generally the US thinks it's strategically advantageous.
Egypt, on the other hand, has a huge fleet of tanks that they just keep in storage (at their own cost). They basically are taking the military aid in the hope that the US would help them should a war develop.
Bridge repair is further complicated by the United States’ form of government. The majority of the major bridges in poor condition in California (and most other states, I presume) were built with Federal highway funds which started drying up in the 1970s, leaving a huge hole in the finances for maintenance.
Since most income and business taxes go to the Federal government, states are dependent on Federal grants for a lot of infrastructure.
That strange to hear. Why do you have this feeling? After visiting Porto and Italy around and below Napoli, I cannot imagine that there are any place in Nordic countries which has even just similar tolerance to not maintain something. But I don’t know too much about Norway specifically.
Infrastructure maintenance was quite a big issue during the 2015 US election. I'm not sure the Trump administration actually did anything about it – I don't really follow US politics that closely. My point is: people do care.
I think the bigger problem is maintenance is just one cost out of many. There's also education, and health care, and social services, and police, and firemen, and pensions, and all sorts of other things, and that's also important. It's relatively easy to "save" on maintenance because nothing is going to fall down immediately and no one will really notice – at least not for a while. In the long run you're not really saving anything of course.
It's easy to critique this from the sidelines, but the pressures politicians and governments are under make it pretty tricky to do anything else. Saving money in other areas is going to be unpopular. Raising taxes even more so. A lot of times stuff like this is a Kobayashi Maru.
If you knew all this, would you have avoided driving over the bridge? Would you have wanted the local government to close it indefinitely awaiting repairs?
Let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and you're in the danger area for 2 minutes, with a 20% chance of fatality (in fact, nobody died). That's still around a one in 4 million chance any given trip kills you, about the same as 30 miles of driving for the average American driver.
Most people would accept that level of risk. Perhaps not to save a couple of minutes on the journey, but if everyone was redirected to another route at rush hour, it might cost each commuter 10-20 minutes.
A handful of newsworthy bridge collapses per decade across the US doesn't seem so bad. Instead of negligence, perhaps that indicates an appropriate level of maintenance and risk tolerance, and an appropriate human price to add to the 500,000 other road deaths over the same period.
A well-maintained (and well designed, but there's no reason to think the design was at fault here) bridge shouldn't collapse. Ever. "Appropriate maintenance" in this case would have been to periodically unclog the drains so the water can run off in a controlled fashion and not pool and corrode the supports. How expensive can that be? Instead, the bridge collapses (and they were lucky that no one was killed in the collapse), and they have to replace it for millions of dollars. Money saved on maintenance is the very definition of the proverb "penny wise, pound foolish" IMHO.
I don’t know how things work in other countries, but in the US new construction is almost always funded with a big chunk of federal dollars (deficit spending), but maintenance has to be done out of your own state or local budget. The incentives are all fucked up.
Same in other countries for many things. It's relatively easier to spend big on white elephants but almost impossible to get basic day-to-day operation money.
Case in point right now at the France-Italy border : they're building the longest rail tunnel in the world under the Alps for tens of billions. There is a tunnel already (Frejus tunnel), which is used at 25% of its capacity, but public money is raining on this unstoppable, useless project.
On the other end, all over Europe and particularly in France and Italy, rail and road infrastructures are in a state of disrepair. Wouldn't this money be better used repairing thousands of bridges, tunnels, etc? Sure, but no politician could campaign on "I've got billions spent in our region!". No multinational civil engineering and construction company such as Eiffage or Bouygues would get big money. All the big boys are in favour of the project, and all the small guys simply don't count.
This is all completely fucked-up, frankly. It's a general failure of democracy and a global corporate takeover.
Additional traffic limitations stem from the impact of excessive train transit on the population living near the line. Some 60,000 people live within 250 m (820 ft) of the historical line, and would object to the noise from late-night transits. In 2007 the conventional line was used for only one-third of this calculated total capacity. This low use level was in part because restrictions such as an unusually low maximum allowable train height and the very steep gradients (26–30‰) and sharp curves in its high valley sections discourage its use.
A 2018 analysis, by contrast, found the existing line close to saturation, largely because safety regulations now prohibit passenger and freight trains from crossing in a single-tube tunnel. This very significantly reduces the maximum allowed capacity of the 13.7 km long Fréjus tunnel, which trains of one type must now fully cross before any train of the other type can be allowed in the other direction. The historical line's path through the deep Maurienne valley is also exposed to rockfalls, and a major landslide in August 2023 forced its closure for most likely over one year.
No that's barely a bad excuse. The projected market for the new line is 500 000 passengers a year, that's 2 trains each way per day. That doesn't even begin making the slightest sense. As passenger traffic cannot be a valid justification, they turned towards fret trains. Too bad, fret has been dropping between France and Italy for some years. Fret trains have dropped dramatically in France well below the European average (17% of cargo traffic) to 9 to 10% of traffic. If you want to revive freight trains, you can't just build one frigging tunnel, you need to rebuild almost from scratch the whole thing first because Fret SNCF has been closed down in 2023 and dismantled!
With the amount of money invested you could probably fly everyone from Lyon to Turin on expensive aviation biofuel for centuries before recouping the humongous investment. This is just stupid grandiosity allied with corruption.
Yeah, that sounds really strange. Not sure how it is elsewhere in Europe, but in Finland whoever builds it, maintains it. Intercity road and rail networks are all owned and managed by the state, and that’s actually how the equivalents of "road" and "street" are defined within the field: anything owned by the state is a road, anything owned by the municipality is a street.
In recent years there have been plans to "boulevardize" some major arterials within city boundaries, meaning the city takes over responsibility of the road segment and turns it into a street with lower speed limits, multimodal access, and so on. The intention is, of course, to facilitate urban development in the corridor.
Finland joined the EU too late and too rich, perhaps. In other countries the EU was the main source of funds for building motorways, but doesn't own them or maintain them.
Hmm, perhaps. These days you can still get 30-50% from the EU but essentially only if it’s part of TEN-T or maybe some Green Deal related project.
The core network of major roads in Finland can be kept in a good shape, the issue is largely the thousands of kms of secondary and tertiary roads in the middle of nowhere that have too little traffic to be any sort of a maintenance priority, or to be eligible for EU funding. But you can’t really help it in a country that’s as sparsely populated as Finland outside major urban areas.
Ah, but replacement comes out of the capital budget not the operating budget, and involves ribbon cuttings and speechifying on opening day as opposed to inconvenient lane closures or even hidden ongoing tasks that are invisible to the voter.
I believe regardless of the actual probability of failure, most people would have refused to drive across the bridge had they seen one of the supports had become completely detached. Another way to put it is if authorities had closed the bridge in 2019, I believe most people wouldn't complain when they were presented the photo of the detached support.
Also I don't think it's possible for your risk calculation to be done preemptively. We don't know the final breaking point of a piece of steel until we break it. All the calculations and modelling of the bridge will have been done with error margins and because of that we don't have any choice but to over-engineer things so we always stay outside of the worse-case margin for error. Given all that, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the risk of a bridge collapse to be a lot lower than the average risk we take on the road.
> That's still around a one in 4 million chance any given trip kills you, about the same as 30 miles of driving for the average American driver.
For those wondering if that is right, it is. Here's the math.
Americans drive about 3.2 trillion miles per year and about 40 000 people are killed. That's one death per 80 000 000 miles.
Assuming each mile is equally deadly, that chances you survive a given a mile would be 79 999 999 / 80 000 000. To survive a trip of N miles, you have to survive each individual mile sequentially. The chances of that would be (79 999 999 / 80 000 000)^N.
The chance of not surviving that trip would then be 1 - (79 999 999 / 80 000 000)^N.
For N = 30 that is 1 / 2 666 667, which is close enough to dmurray's number to count as a match. There's enough fuzziness is in the inputs that all we can hope for is the same ballpark.
I've seen others say the rate is one death per 120 000 000 miles, and for N = 30 that does give 1 / 4 000 000, so I'd guess they are using that rate.
> Most people would accept that level of risk. Perhaps not to save a couple of minutes on the journey, but if everyone was redirected to another route at rush hour, it might cost each commuter 10-20 minutes
One big difference is that with the bridge everyone has the average risk. I cross the bridge, I'm rolling a d4000000 and hoping I don't get a 1.
With a car I can take steps to make the chances of dying on my particular trip much lower than average. With the car I can often time my trip so as to go at times of day or during weather conditions or during traffic conditions when accident rates are lower.
> Let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and you're in the danger area for 2 minutes, with a 20% chance of fatality
Or how about let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and a school bus with twenty kids in it drives over the bridge twice a day, with each child facing a 20% chance of fatality.
‘I probably won’t be the one who dies when it collapses’ is a terrible metric for whether or not we should try to mitigate the risk of a bridge collapse.
School buses are an excellent way to think about risk if you are a school transportation planner. I was trying to give you an example of someone who might make a different risk calculation than an individual.
It's likely that you live in an area with similar mortality risk from air pollution. Is there a reason not to move to an area with lower risk from air pollution?
Loneliness is quite damaging to someone’s health. Why are you irrationally suggesting to him to dump all his social ties and net raise his risk of disease and death?
Air pollution causes ‘excess deaths’ in the sense that people die of air pollution related diseases at some rate instead of dying of something else, generally a short time later. There’s a very different risk assessment between long term choices that have a remote effect on the likely ultimate cause of your inevitable death, versus the probability of premature death through a sudden violent traumatic event.
I get your point, however, no offense intended, this type of questioning is kinda asinine. One risk is immediate (right now), and to a relative extent, an easy choice to mitigate. The other risk is long term (maybe never), and mitigating the risk is much more costly (uprooting family, moving, finding a new residence... with today's prices).
> It's likely that you live in an area with similar mortality risk from air pollution.
They're not really equivalent, unless you've got a high-risk condition like asthma.
Statistically speaking, a 100% chance of losing one year of lifespan (out of the 76 years an American can expect) is a greater mortality risk than a 1% chance of instant, immediate death.
In fact, if you're aged 26, a 1% chance instant death has half the mortality risk - and the older you get, the better it looks.
However, if you look at humans' revealed preferences, people would much rather lose one year of lifespan than take a 1% chance of losing their entire remaining lifespan.
Mortality risk isn't a very good predictor of human preferences, it turns out.
Something I think you're missing here is that when the bridge collapses, cars can no longer drive across it until a new bridge is built, so the inconvenience is almost certainly much worse than if they'd just closed it for maintenance for a bit in the first place.
Also, it probably would have been a lot cheaper to have someone roto-rooter all the drains of all the bridges in Pittsburg once a year than to clean up one collapsed bridge and rebuild it on short notice. I suspect they have other bridges with similar water damage and have to pay to fix those too.
I am fairly certain that a large majority of people, if they'd have had access to those images of the bridges structural members, would have stopped using it.
Most people are unable to accurately diagnose a bridge structure other than "yeah looks rusty". And if that were the case, they wouldn't be driving much of anywhere in that part of the country, which is called the "rust belt" for a reason. Pittsburgh has a very high number of bridges, if you go anywhere in that city and you don't want to cross a rusty bridge, you can't go very far.
It's an important enough member to warrant 10 (I am assuming symmetry here, you cannot see all of them) not quite tiny bolts and nuts, but you can see clearly through the thing.
"rust belt" is often used collectively to describe all of the decay in the region, not just the decrease in industry. As industry pulled out of the region, a lot of infrastructure deteriorated with it.
The average American driver includes drunk and tired drivers who play on their phone while speeding. The numbers for sober people driving reasonably e.g. on their commute are probably better.
Yeah it's exactly this mentality that resulted in the Ford Pinto scandal of the 70s.
How does that 1:4M probability change when you commute over the bridge twice a day? Humans are notorious for being bad gauging risk, and we very often make the mistake that past success means lower risk of future failure, which for a deteriorating bridge is exactly the opposite of what's going to happen.
In my opinion bridges shouldn't collapse, like ever. Annual inspections for years prior pointed to a severely deteriorating structure, even after the temporary cable stays were put in place. The tweet with a picture of a completely detached member a couple of years before the collapse makes this even more egregious.
This is a textbook example of where bureaucracy prevails over common sense. Heads should roll. Thankfully nobody died, but the lack of maintenance and upkeep resulted in a total failure, wasting lots of taxpayer money to replace.
2x daily 30 mile commute sounds like a (relatively) substantial risk to me? Driving is already more or less the most dangerous activity most people engage in nowadays, tolerated by long acclimatization and sheer utility.
Moreover, people generally perceive things in which they (theoretically) have more control over as safer - You can control/mitigate the risk you undertake as a driver to some extent (drive slower, bigger gaps, etc), not so for a random bridge collapse.
The Pinto thing was dramatically overblown. And seriously set back the acceptance of small cars in the US. For a supposed environmentalist and consumer advocate, Ralph Nadar did FAR more harm than good by grifting off a bunch of sensationalist poppycock. That he's still looked upon as some sort of folk hero is beyond disgusting and just shows how gullible people continue to be paying attention only to the sensationalistic superficial propaganda and not looking deeper.
Predictions and pre vs post accident is an interesting subject.
Which bridge that is currently in operation should be closed next?
(Not a dunk on the article, which brilliantly addresses the difficulty of knowing in advance vs making real world changes. Practical Engineering is an awesome YouTube channel!)
> Which bridge that is currently in operation should be closed next?
The article/video actually touches on this:
> The City of Pittsburgh quadrupled their spending on inspection, maintenance, and repairs. And they redid the load ratings on all the bridges they owned, resulting in one bridge being closed until it can be rehabilitated and two more having lane restrictions imposed.
Damn, I was hoping this bridge would stay in its current limbo state where it's open to pedestrians and bikes but closed to vehicles. It's so much nicer not having a five lane stroad that lets cars go 50mph into a park, and instead having a pseudo-community space.
It really is supremely fortunate that the collapse took place in the early morning when few people were about. I've walked under that bridge many times, it's a lovely recreational footpath through the heart of Frick Park, and more than once I've clambered up the hillside under the bridge for fun.
An interesting takeaway is that a simple task like cleaning the drainage grates and preventing them from being clogged probably would have saved the bridge. The bridge has a prescribed drainage path, and with the grates clogged the water drains and pools in other places, accelerating the corrosion.
I used to walk across this bridge every day. You could feel whole bridge shake when heavy vehicles would drive over it (Lived in Reagent Square 2017 - 2019). I remember one morning I was trapped on the bridge for an hour in traffic on my drive to school because the city of Pittsburgh could not afford to keep the roads plowed.
Very thankful that nobody was hurt when it collapsed, and as other people have pointed out it is representative of all of the infrastructure that many cities have but can no longer afford to maintain or replace.
This is why I think nuclear power is a bad idea. Paying back a multibillion dollar investment takes decades. Operating costs eat into profits.
The financial incentive is to run them as cheaply as possible for as long as possible. In a place where there’s a strong work ethic and good maintenance history that might be fine.
Look around at your infrastructure before climbing on the nuclear bandwagon.
A better comparison for nuclear power is the airplane industry. No one goes into the bridge running plant every day and runs the bridge for a living, with several people assigned to run a daily checklist on said bridge.
But it's still not a very good comparison, because airplanes, due to their very nature, can't be designed to fail safe. Nuclear power plants can.
> No one holds a press conference and cuts a big ribbon at the end of a bridge inspection or structural retrofit.
maybe they should. maybe we could celebrate repair like we do new construction. there’s a comfort in knowing we’ve been put good again that’s worth signifying.
Not an engineer, found the video on this fascinating and very approachable. It sounds like the NTSB report did a surprisingly good job of addressing the multiple mistakes and failures that led to the bridge collapse.
But to the bigger point made near the end, without a person in the loop who both appreciates the meaning held within the inspection reports AND having the power to act on that information, we still remain vulnerable to the complexity of our own social systems becoming too inefficient to handle problems like this.
To prevent this from happening in the future, I would give the inspectors the right to immediately close a bridge when it got to be this bad. If the owner forcibly reopened it, they would lose any insurance coverage on it (be totally liable for consequences).
This seems reasonable, but there's also the concern of abuse of power. Like when the mob or politicians had control of local labor unions and inspectors on payroll. They would force closures of bridges, roads, building, etc to hire mob run construction companies to do the repairs. Maybe there are enough federal safeguards in place for this now at DOT (Department of Transportation) level.
This is all interesting, but misses the point: the bridge collapsed due to a social (management, responsibilities, organization, ...) failure. Investigating the engineering story distracts from that, both in the video and apparently effectively as there is a NTSB investigation and not mentioning if any organizational review if the same rigor.
He talks about this a bit in the final three paragraphs, that the people writing the work orders are already overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork they need to deal with, preventing them from paying enough attention to what these reports are actually saying, and these new recommendations will have the primary effect of increasing that burden.
(haven't yet read the full report) If NTSB in non-aviation areas works the same way as in aviation areas, that's definitely covered by the investigation.
That's why ridiculously common case summarized as "pilot error" usually involves several components including organization, training, etc.
EDIT (After reading the report): And indeed, "what we found" section and "what we recommend" is all about how PennDOT and related orgs operate.
Grady does not miss the point, but repeatedly says he does not understand the social part. This calls for someone else with better expertise to do that kind of analysis.
Practical Engineering is emphasizing the suddenness of the collapse itself and pointing out that it was impossible for drivers (who were not aware of past inspections) to do anything about it. There is no inconsistency.
I just spent the last 4 years living in a series of countries that Americans would call ‘3rd world’. Places where proper funding of infrastructure, let alone inspections are so far below US metrics of adequate, they’d legitimately scare you.
Bridges and overpasses that exist until they break and the people die. People call out to God for justice! But all that infra is then rebuilt the same way if it’s rebuilt / when it’s rebuilt.
Something something American tech people have forgotten just how amazing the US is because they don’t realize how good it is. They take too much for granted. They have the safety to be snarky on the internet.
So its okay that bridges in US fall, even when being inspected dozen of times and being urged for repairs every time, because other countries have it worse?
Why not compare to country where bridges dont fall at all?
On the engineering side - you learn far more from analyzing failures than from analyzing successes.
On the social side - there's nothing mysterious about how the US bureaucracy failed here. Briefly contrasting that with Utopialand (where the society & government are different, and bridges never fall) can work as journalism. Or as a rebuttal to "failures will always happen" doomsayers. But the utility is pretty limited. The US isn't a tech company, where you might fire up the troops by talking about how your competition is delivering obviously-better results on metric X.
> On the engineering side - you learn far more from analyzing failures than from analyzing successes.
This is just sophistry. You won't learn how this collapse could have been prevented, or how to prevent others like it, by studying countries where infrastructure is worse. You're already doing better than those places, and still it's not enough.
Also, I'm pretty sure engineering schools study both failures and successes. It is incredible to me that someone would honestly believe studying bridges that have not fallen is useless.
This viewpoint is funny, because if you go to many places in Eastern Europe that Americans likely consider "behind", the infrastructure is far, far superior to anything in the US. In my experience, pretty much every developed country has better infrastructure than the US.
If you're going to use the political definition of "third world", then you need to include Switzerland. I'm sure that's not the type of country the OP was referring to. These days, almost everyone who uses this term is using it in the economic sense, since the Cold War has been over for decades.
Do you also complain when people use the term "decimated" and they aren't talking about killing 1 of every 10 soldiers?
Sure but my point was more that if you grab your passport and go for a walk, most places are going to have better infrastructure - even the “second world” countries like the Balkans.
You can also get a passport and go somewhere better. And the US is richer then those places. So take a walk and think about how to actually systematically improve infrastructure management.
> how amazing the US is because they don’t realize how good it is.
And then there's a political commentator who calls the United States (and the United Kingdom) a Fourth World -- and that's not a positive thing. https://archive.is/UIr49
How America Collapsed and Became a Fourth World Country
16 of the worst are in LA county and several see 300k trips daily, including one carrying the 405.[1]
0. PDF https://artbabridgereport.org/reports/2023-ARTBA-Bridge-Repo...
1. https://artbabridgereport.org/state/ranking/top-bridges
EDIT: States with the least % of SD bridges: AZ, NV, TX, DE, and UT.
WV and IA have the most at almost 20% SD bridges respectively. (1 in 5!)
EDIT2: Raw data https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/ascii.cfm