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Automotive News & Views Are heavy vehicles destroying our bridges?
74 messages, Last post on Feb 04, 2008 at 1:06 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
Whoa! Now that and the Burlington-Bristol Bridge are real adventures!
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Replying to: fezo (Aug 03, 2007 11:10 am) Have you ever noticed that ancient structures lasted for hundreds or even thousands of years. Why was that? What is the lifespan of our modern structures? I know in Boston the elevated highway was 40-50 years old and crumbling. It takes 15 years and $20B to replace it. How long are the new tunnels and bridges going to last? I hope not just 40 years! Maybe we should question whether regular steel and concrete are the best building materials. Replace their use where possible. Once steel is delivered to a building site, and put at the site, you start getting corrosion even before the steel is up. That doesn't bode well for long-life. But I believe a lot of the construction attitude in this country is that we'll just replace it and that creates a lot of jobs, and chances for corruption to skim from the projects. I'm afraid we have too much of a throw-away philosophy, that is now a paradigm of policy.
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Replying to: euphonium (Aug 03, 2007 9:45 am) Well, where are our gasoline taxes and tolls going??? To Iraq??? I know here in RI, where we pay some of the largest STATE gas tax in the country, it is SUPPOSED to fund road repairs. Most of it ends up in our general fund, to be spent elsewhere. If the feds and other states do this, it's not fair. This money should be spent on repairs, new infrastructure, and public transportation ONLY!!!!
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Replying to: cooterbfd (Aug 03, 2007 1:02 pm) |
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Replying to: fezo (Aug 03, 2007 12:10 pm) Precisely so. Big shiny capital projects are much sexier to show off to the folks at home than periodic inspection and maintenance would be. I mean which do you notice more, a big building project of a few guys painting? Of course a couple of the most impressive bridges are the ones that ARE older and maintained. I already used the Golden Gate as an example. The George Washington is another. |
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I blame Rosie O'Donnell and Queen Latifah- and whoever keeps them supplied with Twinkies.
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Replying to: roadburner (Aug 03, 2007 2:08 pm) |
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Replying to: euphonium (Aug 03, 2007 9:45 am) You must be in my neck of the woods to be talking about the Longview (Lewis & Clark) bridge. I was surprised to hear that 7 years ago, that bridge was inspected and they didn't do anything since then. I may have heard it wrong on the radio, but that seemed odd. Oregon is constantly inspecting the bridges. They have trucks with special cranes that swing down over the side and the inspectors can view the underside of the bridge and inspect it. |
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Replying to: kernick (Aug 03, 2007 12:34 pm) I think that is exactly correct. It makes no difference if it is a car, computer or bridge. I watch the strip malls going up in So. CA. They are pathetic examples of horrible construction. They will be gone in 20 years for sure. Wonder if the pyramids were built like the I35 bridge over the Mississippi river. All we know how to build is for the short term. I wanted to build an adobe home. I see adobe homes in Mexico that are 300-400 years old and still standing. No that is not compatible with current building standards. Yeah, the city wants a house that falls apart in 20 years so they get more taxes on the rebuild. The authorities reviewed the safety record of the bridge, which had been designated “structurally deficient” as early as 1990. More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the I-35W bridge, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion. 159,000. That's the approximate number of bridges that are either "deficient" or "obsolete," according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. 159,000. That's more than one in four. Approximately 73,000 of them are "structurally deficient" - like the bridge in Minneapolis - while 80,000 others are "functionally obsolete." That means they're carrying more traffic than they were designed to carry. Not scary enough? Then try this quote on for size: "I think we're going to see bridges collapse, and we do on a regular basis," said Kent Harries of the University of Pittsburgh's School of Engineering. London bridges falling down
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Replying to: gagrice (Aug 03, 2007 7:47 pm)
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