[HN Gopher] Bridge collapse in Pittsburgh's Frick Park
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Bridge collapse in Pittsburgh's Frick Park
Author : f154hfds
Score : 281 points
Date : 2022-01-28 14:09 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (triblive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (triblive.com)
| horsefeathers wrote:
| vmchale wrote:
| Lots of Chernobyl/Bhopal moments in the US lately.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Both Chernobyl and Bhopal were orders of magnitude more
| catastrophic than anything the US has seen. Now, given how the
| US maintains infrastructure, it's only a matter of time for
| that statement to become outdated.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| One block from my friends house! Holy shit glad nobody is hurt.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Title of the article: "10 injured in bridge collapse in
| Pittsburgh's Frick Park"
|
| So, 10 people were hurt. But they say none of the injuries
| appear life-threatening, so there's that.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| I just went over to the Penn DOT website to see how many other
| bridges around the state are in "poor" condition. Answer: 4,157.
| :-O. There's even more local bridges in "poor" condition than in
| "good" condition.
|
| Screens of the report (server is slow):
|
| https://ibb.co/YjZDSWr
|
| https://ibb.co/zFCtmCp
|
| Tool links:
|
| https://gis.penndot.gov/paprojects/BridgeConditionsMap.aspx#
|
| https://gis.penndot.gov/paprojects/Reports/BridgeConditionsR...
| 34679 wrote:
| This surprises me. My only experience with Pennsylvania was
| making the mistake of not unchecking "Avoid Tolls" when driving
| across the state. I got a bill for over $80 for taking the
| turnpike. That's one way on a single day in a normal passenger
| vehicle without a trailer. I thought I had been busted by a
| speed camera or something, because an amount like that is
| closer to a fine than any toll I've ever paid. I would've
| thought they used that money for infrastructure.
| nr2x wrote:
| I once had the opportunity to visit a department of homeland
| security fusion center in Philadelphia. They had walls of
| displays showing surveillance cameras looking at bridges that
| were actively rusting apart. You would think the better public
| safety investment would be fewer fusion centers and more
| bridges that aren't rusting.
| bmitc wrote:
| This is the type of stuff that concerns me heavily. As I drive
| across bridges or walk across them, I'm always wondering about
| who checks up on them. I always try to convince myself that
| _someone_ is and that there 's followups to things. I think
| when I was younger, I always assumed that someone was taking
| care of things, and then as I get older, I found out no one
| really is.
|
| I wonder if there's a tipping point for American infrastructure
| and institutions, just like there will be with climate change.
| There's only so much you can push growth, tax breaks for the
| wealthy, corruption, etc. and not see eventual repercussions.
| nradov wrote:
| It turns out that sometimes no one is checking.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/business-
| lifestyle-681c35ee3afdd4...
| mysterydip wrote:
| As a former resident of the Pittsburgh region, it's not
| surprising. It seems like the same problem as convincing
| business owners to invest in backup or disaster recovery
| solutions. No one who can do anything about it cares until the
| worst happens, and then it's too late.
| notacoward wrote:
| It's not just PA, unfortunately. It's every state. I don't even
| need to look up the numbers in my own state (MA) because I've
| been paying enough attention to know already that "far too
| many" will be the answer. We've been neglecting this kind of
| infrastructure for far too long, because there's not enough
| political capital in making it a priority. Nobody cares until
| _after_ the disasters happen. Just like computer security, I
| guess.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| MA's problem is they spent all their money for 30yr on the
| big dig leaving nothing left for anything beyond the most
| minimal maintenance of every other piece of infrastructure.
| Basically everything got rode hard and put away wet for 30yr.
| That'll come back to bite them but the people responsible
| will be comfortably retired by then.
| thehappypm wrote:
| MA at least is willing to improve things. I think the best
| example is the upcoming Allston throat I-90 viaduct
| replacement.
|
| Today, the interstate is elevated above another minor
| highway, in a narrow strip of land between Boston University
| and the Charles River, which also includes a bike path and
| pedestrian walkway AND a major rail artery. The viaduct is in
| need of replacement, and viaducts are way, way more expensive
| to maintain than at-grade highways. The new plan is pretty
| impressive: thanks in part to Boston University giving up
| some land, the planners found a way to squeeze everything
| onto the ground level, with the two highways, the railroad,
| and the pedestrian area all side-by-side. It's kind of a mess
| to have so much going on in the throat, but it checks all the
| boxes, and is a more future-proof solution than building yet
| another viaduct that won't last.
|
| That project is gonna SUCK for commuters and cost a fortune,
| but the end state will be a better, safer, easier-to-maintain
| critical piece of infrastructure that supports cars, buses,
| rail, bikers, and pedestrians.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I just want to throw this out as a counterpoint to the "our
| infrastructure is crumbling" narrative:
| https://www.slowboring.com/p/roads-and-bridges (look
| specifically at the bridge part)
|
| Which isn't to say there aren't _targeted_ places we should
| improve, but I think these discussions often boil down to
| "everything is awful and unmaintained" which isn't true.
| thehappypm wrote:
| All infrastructure is always crumbling. Nothing ever gets
| better with age, from the second a project is done it starts
| "crumbling".
| giantg2 wrote:
| Not exactly true. Concrete gets stronger as it cures. It
| can take months or years to cure (or decades for the Hoover
| dam). So technically it gets better with some aging.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "these discussions often boil down to "everything is awful
| and unmaintained" which isn't true."
|
| Have you been to western PA? (Half serious)
| LegitShady wrote:
| I think the big deal here is the difference between local and
| national levels. The levels of gun from in the United States
| are high. The levels of gun crime in Detroit are
| catastrophic.
|
| Overall the level of infrastructure across the nation is ok.
| In some areas the level of infrastructure is catastrophic and
| local funding probably won't improve it any time soon.
|
| A bridge collapsing is a big deal especially in urban areas.
| I can only wonder at the luck that seems to have avoided mass
| casualties in this case.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Chinese people: we can build so fast
|
| Americans: Well, that's because you don't build it to not fall
| down. That's why we build slowly.
|
| Americans: our shit falls down anyway
| mlac wrote:
| This hits close to home... I've run under and over that bridge
| many, many times. I really hope no one was on their morning run
| under it, but it looks like everyone who was on it got away with
| minor injuries.
|
| It is a main artery for connecting two neighborhoods... there are
| many bridges like this all over Pittsburgh, but it's not the
| "big" ones over one of the three rivers.
|
| Odd timing, but Biden is also in town today. Talk about crumbling
| critical infrastructure...
| mythrwy wrote:
| I worked as a project manager doing construction contracts for
| federal and state governments at one point for nearly a decade.
|
| My take is that more tax money might not necessarily get better
| results. At least not at a cost in proportion to value
| realized.
|
| It would also take capable leaders at multiple levels extremely
| focused on end results rather then various forms of grift, and
| those would be fought every step of the way by numerous and
| very clever trough feeders.
|
| I don't know the answer but certainly we can do a little better
| with what we have and eventually we will have to. Or do
| without. There is no free money in the end.
| MisterSandman wrote:
| It blows my mind that the richest country in the world can't
| afford better infrastructure. I know that's not how economies
| and capitalism works, but it really shouldn't be like that.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The US is having a hard time making a cultural transition
| from a boom mindset to a sustaining mindset. We are about one
| generation out, maybe one and a half, since there was
| significant value in tooling our manufacturing and
| development process for territorial conquest. That tooling
| got a shot in the arm during World War II and a second shot
| in the arm during the space race that kept it going longer
| than it would have otherwise, but America is a coast to coast
| country with no more frontier, and Americans need to learn
| how to sustain what exists and find value in sustaining what
| exists rather than rewarding primarily those who create new.
|
| ... Or just be comfortable with the idea that we're going to
| always have shiny things that wear out faster than they
| should and fail when we're relying on them.
| lanstin wrote:
| Rise of the maintenance engineering mindset!
| jacquesm wrote:
| The US is the richest country because it has quite a few of
| the richest individuals. But the enormous amounts of money
| spent on armaments has reduced the amount of money available
| for infrastructure maintenance and other necessities.
| philistine wrote:
| The US is amassing through taxes a smaller percentage
| compared to other developed nations. The US taxes lightly.
| Then it's putting a ton of that money (and even more
| through debt) into the military.
|
| The money available is not a zero-sum game. The US could
| raise its taxes.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> But the enormous amounts of money spent on armaments has
| reduced the amount of money available for infrastructure
| maintenance and other necessities.
|
| Which is odd because (I think) part of government spending
| seems to be redistribution of money, which would be better
| achieved through maintenance of infrastructure.
| bloopernova wrote:
| (This is my subjective, personal, and probably poorly-
| educated take)
|
| It feels like the US has shot itself in the foot by
| demonizing socialism and communism. Not because those
| ideologies would have fixed this issue, but because so many
| US residents have translated "socialism is bad" into "all
| government spending is bad".
|
| In my town, there's a vocal group of older people who rant
| against using their taxes to pay for schools. Their argument
| is that they don't use those services, their children are
| older or nonexistent. They reject the "rising tide lifts all
| boats" argument, and reject that an educated populace
| improves their quality of life. They only see the short term
| bill of property tax. I think that attitude is present in a
| lot of people, encouraged by the argument against government
| spending and collective action.
|
| I'm not sure what the end state of this attitude will be. The
| selfishness that exists in our culture doesn't seem to be
| slowing, if anything it feels like it is accelerating. I
| think there's going to be a lot more bridge collapses, people
| stuck in snow drifts on interstates for 36 hours, a lot more
| disaster and suffering before anything changes.
|
| (I also don't have any solutions for this. I don't wish for
| disaster and doom, and human suffering is utterly awful
| especially in what is supposed to be an enlightened future.
| But I wonder if things will have to get a lot worse before
| society changes its course)
| mythrwy wrote:
| I don't think government spending is necessarily bad, but a
| lot of it is wastefully spent with little productive to
| show for it.
|
| People have been talking shovel ready jobs forever. Where
| are the Trump infrastructure jobs? The Obama "shovel ready"
| jobs? Think this time will be any different? I don't.
|
| I do agree the whole system breaking (sadly) may be
| requirement to return to productive and rational behavior.
| There is entirely too much grift and performative rather
| then productive behavior at many levels right now and that
| is very hard to displace once it becomes institutionalized.
| andrew_ wrote:
| I think you're missing a key point here: this bridge is
| maintained by PennDOT. That's not federal, that's state.
| PennDOT's own report, according the article, showed that the
| bridge was in poor condition. It's a failure on PennDOT, a
| local bureaucracy, not the entirety of the "richest country
| in the world."
|
| In the U.S., different pieces of infrastructure is delegated
| to different authorities. It's up to those authorities to
| maintain those pieces. They choose how to spend and where to
| spend. Now, the argument could be made that funding is an
| issue, and in some states it is. Hence the latest bill to
| fund more infrastructure repair. But it's not such an issue
| in many places in the country. Anecdotally, growing up in a
| Northern state, we would always complain about how much
| better the roads in our neighboring state to the South were.
| And they actually were, because the folks who ran Ohio's DOT
| straight up managed it better.
|
| I now live in the South, and I'm very pleased with how the
| State and Counties here manage and maintain roads, bridges,
| and rail line crossings.
| chrisan wrote:
| Speaking of anecdotes, I grew up in Pittsburgh, later lived
| in Ohio, then Michigan. Ohio roads were pothole city and I
| always thought Michigan roads were good.
|
| I now live in North Carolina and the roads around here are
| pretty crap. Shoulders either non-existent or crumbling off
| from rain erosion. Not many pot holes however since we
| don't see much freeze/thaw compared to Ohio.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The failure of the richest country is a lack of methods to
| capture that wealth and funnel it to where it's needed.
|
| Google has offices in Pittsburgh. Want to take a guess at
| what percentage of Google's tax money went to maintaining a
| bridge its employees drive on every day?
|
| ETA: the problem in Pittsburgh in particular is compounded
| by the nature of the major employers in the city.
|
| Often, taxes for things like bridges in town would be paid
| by real estate taxes. But four of the largest employers in
| Pittsburgh are UPMC, Highmark / Allegheny Health Network,
| University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University.
|
| As non-profit institutions, they don't pay taxes on the
| real estate they use. It is not certain that a city the
| size of Pittsburgh with so much real estate out of the
| taxability space is a sustainable model in any sense.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The roads are better maintained in New York to the north.
| Same weather conditions. Pennsylvania has a special sort of
| infrastructure neglect.
| bmj wrote:
| _there are many bridges like this all over Pittsburgh_
|
| This is the really scary part. Given PGH's geography, it is
| nearly impossible to travel through the city in an efficient
| way without crossing a bridge.
|
| Also, let's not forget the sinkhole incident[0].
|
| [0] https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2019/10/28/port-authority-
| bu...
| Proven wrote:
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Its stuff like this that scares me. Pittsburgh claims to have
| more bridges than any other city in the world.[0] You're driving
| around here, and you cross little ones without noticing. I hope
| I'm not ever near (or using) a collapsing one. The rivers are big
| here.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-30187252
|
| Edit: not bridge related, but a sinkhole opened downtown over 2
| years ago, also swallowing a bus: https://www.post-
| gazette.com/news/transportation/2019/10/28/...
| pilingual wrote:
| I seem to recall Rick Sebak citing some statistics in his
| documentary about Pittsburgh's bridges, but I'm unsure of the
| details. The documentary reviews different types of bridges on
| the river, shows an inspection, and interviews people working
| on them. (All of Sebak's documentaries are recommended! I can't
| think of any other series that brings out the warmth and charm
| of a city.)
|
| https://www.wqed.org/watch/pittsburgh-history-series/flying-...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Well, statistically then, this all makes sense.
|
| As these things come it could have been a lot worse. I
| immediately thought back to the bridge collapse in Italy not
| all that long ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi
| mlac wrote:
| It looked like light traffic on a morning commute.
| Unfortunate a bus was on there. But during rush hour, traffic
| is fully backed up there and stacked on the road. It could
| have easily been 30-40 cars + a bus instead of what was
| there.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Very, very lucky. Taking into account the kinds of vehicles
| you come across every day, hazardous goods, school buses
| and so on.
| Findecanor wrote:
| I think the city of Hamburg could have more bridges, but it
| depends a lot on how you count. Do you count only road bridges?
| Do you count only the city centre?
| DominikPeters wrote:
| BBC article mentions 446 bridges in Pittsburgh, Wikipedia
| mentions 2,496 bridges in Hamburg, with 1,172 road bridges.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridges_in_Hamburg
| owlninja wrote:
| I imagine it is just a quirk of the city and people given
| it also says "and don't try telling locals otherwise."
| jleyank wrote:
| Hamburg is a state in Germany. Pittsburgh is a city in a
| state that dislikes its two big cities. This might have a
| difference.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| It's a city state. Still, according to Wikipedia it
| covers almost five times the area.
| ineedasername wrote:
| It looks like that's still more bridges per capita for
| Pittsburgh, maybe that's the metric they're using.
| BigJono wrote:
| This sort of thing always crops up when comparing US
| cities to cities in other countries.
|
| Other countries tend to count more of the surrounding
| built up areas as part of the city itself. Whereas every
| time I look at a US city there's places chock full of
| buildings right next door that somehow don't count.
|
| Looking at Pittsburg there's a bunch of "townships" and
| things which would be considered part of the city in most
| other countries, which makes it difficult to compare
| absolute metrics like "number of bridges in the city".
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| US cities are usually considered by their city limits,
| which are almost always pretty small, and have lots of
| smaller suburbs surrounding them.
|
| The other countries definition seems more analogous to
| the US Census Bureau metro areas. https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
| tgflynn wrote:
| That's definitely not true in general, in fact my
| impression has always been the exact opposite. France, in
| particular, has a very large number of distinct
| municipalities (called communes). Paris proper includes
| only the very high-density central and historical core of
| the city. The inner ring suburbs still appear very urban.
| Compared to New York it would be like comparing the 5
| boroughs = 1 city with the entire Paris region which
| probably contains dozens of distinct municipalities.
| notahacker wrote:
| Other obvious comparison points off the top of my head
| would be Venice (~400 bridges, much smaller than Pittsburgh
| if you count the island city rather than the broader
| region), Amsterdam (bigger, but has 1200 bridges
| apparently) and Birmingham UK (no total for bridges found
| with a quick Google but there's 100 miles of canal and a
| _lot_ of elevated urban motorway and railway). But the
| great thing about being the place with the 'most bridges
| in the world' is that if you've got an impressive number of
| bridges, who's counting?
| colpabar wrote:
| Pittsburgh, by population, is 6 times smaller than Hamburg
| (300k vs 1.8m). I'm not sure about size, but Pittsburgh is
| pretty small and the bridge density is pretty high. I think
| that's where the "city of bridges" title comes from.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's weird that Pittsburg is so small and yet as a
| midwesterner (who's driven through PA into NY a couple of
| times) I'd never heard of Hamburg until this thread.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| There's a Hamburg, NY FYI
| [deleted]
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| The pittsburgh metro area is larger than the city itself,
| area wise the city is only about 50 square miles vs
| hamburgs 200+
| throw7 wrote:
| Bridge became disjointed in Albany: https://www.eng-
| tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=130405
|
| I remember it pretty vividly because the woman who drove over
| it was on the local news in tears. Could have been much worse.
| [deleted]
| lbriner wrote:
| There was an article posted on HN about a year ago, which said
| that most/all urban areas in the US (and I suspect in many other
| countries) cannot afford to maintain their infrastructure and are
| just buying time before major problems with water/sewerage/roads
| etc.
|
| I can honestly imagine that any local authority who might apply
| for e.g. $50M to build a bridge do not make sure they can either
| amortize that cost over 50 years to replace it or otherwise add a
| reasonable amount of yearly expenditure to make repairs as
| needed. Concrete seems particularly bad since it is very hard to
| "repair" and the knowledge of how to build it properly only 50
| years ago was poor. Lots of major concrete structures have not
| lasted long.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Only a tiny exaggeration by the submitter there! Makes it sound
| like a bridge over the Monongahela collapsed, which it didn't.
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| It is a "major" bridge. I've driven over it more than a
| thousand times, given that it was on my commute route for
| several years of my career. Had this collapsed at rush hour,
| 5pm, two of four lanes would have been filled with cars backed
| up waiting in traffic.
|
| The best photo I can find of it to see the scale:
|
| https://twitter.com/shadow/status/1487051654121807875/photo/...
|
| It is the bridge on the bottom.
| rossitter wrote:
| This image from Streetview, taken about halfway across the
| bridge, shows the scale well, I think: https://www.google.com
| /maps/@40.439515,-79.9004771,3a,75y,99...
| hiidrew wrote:
| I also think the bridge is pretty high up, I'd say around 40-50
| feet high.
|
| Thankfully below it was a nature trail. Could have been worse
| if it was one of the bridges over the rivers or highways.
| bmj wrote:
| Thankfully there didn't seem to be anyone on the trail! That
| is a heavily trafficked trail during the day, and there is a
| dog park in the shadow of the bridge. I use that trail all
| the time to access the mountain bike trails that Frick Park
| has.
| hiidrew wrote:
| Seriously! I imagine if this was the summer some would be
| out.
| jacknews wrote:
| Most of those photos don't do it justice, they make it look
| like a few meters of concrete block over a stream.
|
| This is the only one that shows the scale: https://assets-
| varnish.triblive.com/2022/01/4691113_web1_ptr...
| holmium wrote:
| This one is another great shot for scale: https://pbs.twimg.c
| om/media/FKMeYsZXEAYzpan?format=jpg&name=...
|
| [from: https://twitter.com/shadow/status/1487065719028207627/
| photo/...]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's major for impact. This bridge carries a significant
| thoroughfare between two of the neighborhoods on the edge of
| town. It's a primary avenue for several bus routes.
|
| Traffic is going to be an absolute nightmare until they restore
| it.
| hnrodey wrote:
| 2025
| curiousllama wrote:
| Maybe not major for Pittsburgh, land of bridges, but sure would
| be major elsewhere. The thing is huge!
| halpert wrote:
| Properly maintained bridges of any size shouldn't randomly
| collapse. It's always major.
| mbauman wrote:
| It is very major. There are only 3 roads that cross this
| (nearly 3 mile) ravine that cuts off a huge portion of the
| city's population: a local 2-lane neighborhood road, Forbes
| (this bridge), and the limited access interstate.
| matsemann wrote:
| Maybe it's the weird capitalization, or that I'm not a native
| English speaker, but "Major Bridge Collapses" to me sounds like
| the title of something. Aka a list of collapses, a book, long
| article about some history or whatever. Not something happening
| right now. So to me the title was underwhelming, not an
| exaggeration, because of that misunderstanding.
| jhauris wrote:
| Since the phrase is an article title it follows the
| capitalization rules. It does get confusing with proper nouns
| sometimes, so there is a slight ambiguity. In this case it's
| probably also confusing that the ending of collapse is the
| same for plural and different tenses.
| paganel wrote:
| Looks pretty big to me. Granted, it's not the Mississippi but
| as long as an articulated bus is involved with lots more
| "bridge" that felt I'd say is pretty big.
| Vrondi wrote:
| It only goes over a little creek. Not even a river.
| mlac wrote:
| It's probably a 50-60 ft ravine and the bridge was probably
| 200ft long (these are guesstimates from just being around
| it).
|
| Edit: I just checked - it was 447 feet. Height is probably
| right, but I might be under by a bit.
| eCa wrote:
| A 150+ ft deep ravine, according to the article:
|
| > Jones estimated that rescue crews had to rappel 100 to
| 150 feet down the ravine to rescue motorists.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Pennsylvania DOT is one of the more corrupt agencies related to
| transportation. As but one example:
|
| https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/former-penndot...
| pwned1 wrote:
| blunte wrote:
| Like other short term focused decisions made by the baby boomer
| generation, the US bridge situation is dire. Within 20 years this
| will be a common news story.
|
| Unfortunately, spending on infrastructure which benefits most
| people (including the business owners who vote against it) is now
| equated with socialism as a dirty word and something which only
| the evil liberals want, because they want to take your hard work
| and money and distribute it to people who don't want to work. At
| least, that's almost verbatim what I'm hearing right now on my
| Texan parents' Fox tv while I visit.
|
| The US is headed for a very dismal half century, and fighting or
| even trying to debate appears to not be an option. I see no
| solution except to call it dead and move to more progressive
| countries.
|
| Unfortunately, some of the smarter more educated other countries
| are now being brainwashed by the same tactics that allowed Fox
| News and conservative radio hosts to lead masses to vote
| aggressively against their own interests.
| [deleted]
| markx2 wrote:
| "We were fortunate," said Mayor Ed Gainey. "A bus went over. And
| right now we don't have no fatalities."
|
| So someone died. Or maybe not.
| [deleted]
| andrew_ wrote:
| Always surprising when public officials slip up in speech like
| that. I'm frequently chastised by my wife for using "got"
| instead of "have" in front of the kids, something I'd wager I'd
| have to be coached on if I took public office.
| psyc wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=aave+"negative+concord"
| netfl0 wrote:
| I've always been weary that we have solely relied on the
| incredible infrastructure investments of our ancestors. Time to
| build some of our own.
| jeffbee wrote:
| And it's not just bridges, it's also homes, schools, roads, and
| railroads. Basically while the older generations were in charge
| is was policy from local to federal level to _build_. It was
| policy to build plenty of homes, plenty of roads, airports,
| universities, even new cities. Then as soon as the Boomers
| ascended to political power, everything flipped: we suddenly
| ceased to build anything, and the only goal of government
| policy became to enrich the people who had already enormously
| benefitted from their parents ' investments, while
| impoverishing the next generation. Taxes were cut. Budgets were
| cut.
|
| Unfortunately the only way out of this mess is to extract
| wealth from those same Boomers, but as long as their
| stranglehold on political power remains - and let's face it,
| they are not even done ascending into power, considering that
| people like Feinstein, Biden, and Pelosi are even older than
| them - it won't happen. The nation will continue to fall to
| pieces.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| Article says this bridge was built in 1970 so not that ancient.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Unfortunately, the downside of the steel boom is that nothing
| about the ability to create all of that infrastructure implied
| anyone put investment into maintaining that infrastructure.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Yeah, lets build a bunch more and stick our descendants with
| the maintenance cost!
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't understand why maintaining local infrastructure should
| be a responsibility of the federal government. I certainly
| don't want my bridges to depend on Congress's ability to
| cooperate.
| boringg wrote:
| Hmm that's a tough question. I am not sure I trust most local
| municipalities to fund infrastructure properly. I would much
| rather have the Feds capabilities and funding.
|
| How do you land on trusting the municipality?
| stickfigure wrote:
| The work is all done by private contractors, so there's
| probably not a material difference in capabilities (just
| funding, which could be routed differently).
| HideousKojima wrote:
| If infrastructure is federally maintained and a bridge in
| Pittsburgh collapses, voters in Alaska, California, or
| Texas aren't really going to care. Or at least not care
| enough to push their congresscritter to actually do
| something about it.
|
| If Pittsburgh pays for its own infrastructure (or
| potentially if it's done at the state level) then voters
| are far more likely to care and to hold their elected
| representatives to task.
|
| A separate reason is that a sizeable chunk of people want
| their tax money to mostly go towards supporting their own
| city/county/state. They don't want tax money from taxpayers
| in Mobile, Alabama funding bridges in Vancouver, Washington
| or vice versa.
|
| Edit: Also if they were federally managed that would likely
| mean the feds giving that money for the states to manage,
| and that always comes with strings attached. See, for
| example, highway funding to states being dependent on
| raising the minimum drinking age to 21
| long_time_gone wrote:
| These seem like arguments to eliminate the federal
| government entirely. If the citizens don't want it and
| don't care about people in other states, then we aren't
| really a union. Meanwhile, the voter in Alaska has a huge
| portion of their infrastructure funded by tax payers in
| other states.
|
| > Also if they were federally managed that would likely
| mean the feds giving that money for the states to manage
|
| It is done that way today because no state collects
| enough gas tax to actually fund their own roads and
| bridges. All money comes with strings attached, it's one
| of the characteristics of money.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| > then we aren't really a union
|
| A republic union in military protection and
| legal/political bridges/agreements.
|
| If the fed is in charge of everything, then there is no
| union, just a large federal state. This is what we're
| becoming as everyone places their hope in Congress for
| solutions.
|
| Like most large countries with a single rule instead of
| unified states, we're going to regret this more as time
| goes on. (Excluding countries smaller in population than
| a single US state)
| SllX wrote:
| The Feds do things besides move our money around
| different States to inefficiently spend on local
| infrastructure.
|
| If you want to go all in on the eliminating the Federal
| government, you'd have to also go after the Military,
| Federal Courts and the Department of State.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| If infrastructure was all locally funded, wouldn't there
| be even worse disparities between rich and poor states?
| From the federal government's point of view, you'd want
| to invest in weaker areas and bring them up to the same
| level as the rest of the country.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| > From the federal government's point of view, you'd want
| to invest in weaker areas and bring them up to the same
| level as the rest of the country
|
| Building bridges to nowhere in Alaska or fancy
| bridges/tunnels in places with zero population density is
| extremely unlikely to make these areas a net contribution
| to the federal budget over the long term - just the
| opposite.
|
| Arguably extremely rural areas are already oversubsidised
| and will be never self-sustaining in terms of
| infrastructure, in terms of just meeting the cost of
| maintaning roads, power, water, mail delivery
| infrastructure...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| What makes you think the federal government is going to
| care more? My impression is that the higher up in
| government you go, the stronger the hold of special
| interests (special interests work for the rich, not the
| poor).
| jtbayly wrote:
| If you find your local municipality corrupt, you can appeal
| higher, or move, or run for office. They answer directly to
| the local voters.
|
| Congress as a whole? Not so much.
| zaphar wrote:
| If you don't trust local municipalities to fund it properly
| why would you trust the federal government to do so. The
| federal goverment is just as politically motivated as a
| local government and even further removed from the problems
| than your local municipality.
| echelon wrote:
| Plus there are opportunity costs. You can't fund infinite
| bridges.
|
| Perhaps you built too many bridges and some of them don't
| service enough people to warrant replacement or repair.
| If you're getting free federal dollars, people don't tend
| to ask about it. High power people might divert funds to
| their preferred projects. Or maybe the spending is just
| outright careless.
|
| By keeping the money local, you tie it to local spending
| and local opportunity cost. There's more oversight, more
| deliberation, and more care as to how the money is
| disbursed. They become political talking points, and
| there's accountability.
|
| Not that there isn't a time and place for federally
| funded projects, but small town bridges probably aren't
| it.
| ip26 wrote:
| I think the idea is the Feds are fundamentally more
| capable at big civil engineering. E.g. the Army Corp of
| Engineers probably knows a lot more about bridges than
| your city streets department.
| zaphar wrote:
| Yeah but the city streets department isn't actually going
| to repair, replace the bridge. They'll hire an accredited
| engineering firm who will in fact be at least as
| competent as the Army Corp of Engineers to build it. Heck
| the inspections are even hired out for small
| municipilities. They don't keep on someone on staff to
| inspect the 5 bridges in typical small rural town rural
| America.
| boringg wrote:
| Or that local private company that won the RFP through a
| corrupted process because they are friends with the local
| small town politicians who will cut corners on safety and
| maintenance while over billing the community.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Thankfully special interests are exclusively a local
| government problem. Imagine if we had this kind of
| corruption at the federal level!
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think the military stands alone as a semi-competent
| federal entity, and I don't think anyone is thinking
| "let's have the military do it" when they're talking
| about putting infrastructure under federal jurisdiction.
| Asking ACoE to manage our national infrastructure is like
| asking the VA to manage our country's healthcare. These
| things aren't well-aligned with the missions of these
| organizations.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The big problem with ACOE is that they'll show up and do
| shit right for the technical definition of right instead
| of the political one and the local moneyed interests
| don't like getting steamrolled like that.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Gee, wish they'd done that in New Orleans with the levee
| piers before Katrina
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| For the last two decades local and state governments have
| been getting things done in the absence of a functional
| federal government. Obviously this isn't uniformly
| distributed--some state and local governments probably do
| suck--but on balance state and local governments are
| outperforming the federal government so it stands to reason
| that far more bridges will be maintained if it's the
| responsibility of state and local governments.
| janpot wrote:
| So weird to me these sort of statements. It doesn't need to
| have a 100% success rate, but if you don't even aim at having
| your democratic institutions cooperate, then what are they
| for exactly? And what do you propose as an alternative?
| private sector? As if they are not known for cutting every
| possible dollar they can on anything they do. At the expense
| of lives if they can get away with it.
| nradov wrote:
| The alternative is to have state and local governments
| allocate funding for infrastructure maintenance. There's no
| need for the federal government to get involved; that just
| creates an extra layer of bureaucracy and waste. Congress
| should only be funding major projects with a significant
| impact on interstate commerce.
| pohl wrote:
| If we could get billionaires - who can apparently afford
| their own hobby space agencies - to pay their taxes, we
| wouldn't need to catastrophize every little perceived
| "waste".
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This feels like argument by meme, and a very tired meme
| at that. FWIW, I probably agree with you that it would be
| nice to have a steeper effective tax rate curve, I just
| find this kind of rhetoric to be very dull.
| pohl wrote:
| That's fair. I feel the same way about your moribund
| federal waste meme.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I didn't reference federal waste. Can you link me to the
| comment that you're interpreting as "my federal waste
| meme"?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm confused by your confusion. :)
|
| > If you don't even aim at having your democratic
| institutions cooperate, then what are they for exactly.
|
| I think they can cooperate, but I don't see why that means
| everything needs to be pushed to the federal level? It
| seems pretty reasonable that local infrastructure should be
| managed by local governments, state infrastructure by state
| governments, and federal infrastructure by federal
| governments.
|
| That said, I'm particularly confused by why you think that
| the purpose of democratic institutions is "cooperation"
| rather than something like "maintaining the rights and
| upholding interests of the public". Cooperation is just a
| means to that end.
| archontes wrote:
| Ultimately, the economics of every one of the states depends
| on the federal government. The government creates dollars in
| locations like vector field sources, and creates sinks by way
| of taxes, thereby setting up flow, motivating activity. For
| the federal government, the vector field is non-conservative.
|
| States, however, don't have a money printer. Every dollar
| they spend, they do have to tax or borrow.
|
| Some questions arise in my head: If local infrastructure
| isn't being maintained, is it because it's not worth
| maintaining? How would we measure that? Does the stochastic
| nature of the problem make it intractable for local/state
| governments?
|
| For example, if I have 4200 bridges that are in need of
| repair in such a way as I can expect two to fail this year,
| and I am unable to predict which two, does preventing two
| collapses necessitate addressing all 4200? Is that scale
| entirely too large for my local government? If it is, is that
| because those 4200 bridges serve too few people? If not, is
| that situation unprecedented (can the local government adapt
| to address a problem that it hasn't had to before)? What if
| the local government is unhealthy (ideologically opposed to
| service, disenfranchised citizens, perhaps a southern state)?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I guess I figured "yes, you do all inspections and
| maintenance on all bridges all the time and pay for it with
| taxes". If taxes go up, so be it.
|
| > What if the local government is unhealthy (ideologically
| opposed to service, disenfranchised citizens, perhaps a
| southern state)?
|
| Yeah, that's a general argument against giving any
| government any kind of responsibility (for any issue, how
| do you know that the government in question will be healthy
| enough to manage the responsibility?). But I think we can
| agree that _some_ government should do this, and given the
| choice between state and local governments which might be
| dysfunctional (but which have collectively outperformed the
| federal government for the last two decades) and the
| federal government which we know to be completely
| dysfunctional, I would pick the former.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Check out the 311 report from 2018:
| https://twitter.com/gpk320/status/1078885655634157569?s=21
| perihelions wrote:
| Text for anyone who can't access it:
|
| > _" @Pgh311 I hope someone is keeping an eye on the underside
| of the Forbes Avenue bridge over Frick Park? One of the big "X"
| beams is rusted through entirely (and, yes, I see the cables,
| so it's probably not a crisis)."_ -Dr. G Kochanski @gpk320
|
| > _" Service Request #307260 has been created.
| https://qalert.me/GRea13511a408a4282815637644fd5a13a"_
| -Pittsburgh 311 Response Center @Pgh311
| joekrill wrote:
| The article says
|
| > It was last inspected in September
|
| So hopefully that's been addressed by now?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "Yup, it's still about to fall down. Successfully inspected!"
| dwringer wrote:
| The Google street view [December 2020] under the bridge appears
| to show a pair of cross braces entirely missing from one side
| of the main supports [0] (compared with the other side[1]).
|
| [0]
| https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4393756,-79.9003658,3a,75y,2...
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4393756,-79.9003658,3a,75y,8...
| somevar wrote:
| Seems confirmed by a follow-up: "Some work was actually done
| a couple of weeks after I reported it: they removed the
| rusted beam. Obviously, that wasn't sufficient, though."
|
| https://twitter.com/gpk320/status/1487099756644114435
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Great catch. That's crazy.
| [deleted]
| XnoiVeX wrote:
| Wow! you may be right.
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| https://twitter.com/gpk320/status/1078885655634157569
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Does indeed appear to be the side with the missing braces--
| the piping seems to match.
| Lammy wrote:
| Hopefully it won't get a blur censor like the damaged pylon
| in the Mexico City Metro viaduct collapse
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046462
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Lot of talk about the Federal government need to step into a city
| and manage the bridges.
|
| Cities have (often highly) paid inspectors to do just that,
| inspect bridges and make recommendations, and issue warnings. As
| noted by PascLeRasc et al. the degradation of the bridge has been
| reported to the city.
|
| As for funding through Federal government, my experience has
| always been:
|
| The resident pays their Federal tax. The Fed takes their
| administrative cut.
|
| Fed allocates remaining funds to the State. The State takes their
| administrative cut.
|
| State allocates remaining funds to the City (or county). The city
| takes their administrative cut.
|
| City allocates remaining funds to contractors to fix the bridges.
|
| Put it in an other way, humans value things exponentially more
| when their own sweat went into the things, than if it was just
| given to them. By coming at State level, residents have a closer
| connection and understanding where the money came from, and would
| demand higher accountability.
|
| Just my opinion.
| [deleted]
| ineedasername wrote:
| Federal taxes redistribute tax money to areas where the burden
| exceeds the local ability to cover the cost. While PA as a
| whole received a bit more than it sends to the Feds, cities
| like Pittsburgh almost always send significantly more on both
| the state & federal level than they receive in return. (I could
| not find specific data for Pittsburgh, so it's possible this
| trend does not apply there.)
|
| Centers of commerce &/or industry like Pittsburgh also tend to
| generate more economic benefits than can easily be measure by
| tax dollars alone.
|
| Administrative costs for programs also don't usually to exceed
| more then 1-2% after accounting for Fed & State administrative
| costs [0] While not great, If the cost of repairing
| infrastructure in a given region is $500,000,000,000, then
| $100M in administrative costs is not going to significantly
| alter the what that pool of money can accomplish, and no matter
| the tax system can never be diminished to 0%.
|
| "Skin in the game" is also not an apt metaphor here. It implies
| that a sufficient number of local residents will care enough
| about something like this, but in reality a bridge or other
| piece of infrastructure 20-30 miles away that a person rarely
| uses is still too abstract of a thing to really feel "Hey, I'd
| be willing to pay more of my own money to cover its cost". If
| you lower their fed taxes and raise their local taxes to cover
| costs I still don't think they'll feel any more sense of
| ownership over the issue than before. For most people, most
| things that are just a little bit outside of their usual
| experience are simply too intangible to feel much skin in the
| game. The situation we're already in with respect to
| infrastructure is a case in point.
|
| [0] https://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-
| feder...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Or they just oppose doing anything at all. Plenty of condos are
| in a similarly extremely dilapidated condition because the
| owners never want to pay for anything.
|
| People won't fund the infrastructure that supports their
| bedroom when it comes out of their own pocket.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| You should look into Strong Towns, they basically make the same
| argument. The Federal govt providing so many grants for
| infrastructure projects have basically made cities spread out,
| overgrown and fiscally insolvent.
| stevetodd wrote:
| I was curious to see how each state was doing and Google didn't
| disappoint:
|
| https://artbabridgereport.org/state/map
| ineedasername wrote:
| An unfortunate punctuation mark for the infrastructure speech the
| President is about to give in PA.
|
| For readers outside of the US, how are similar infrastructure
| issues?
| ModernMech wrote:
| Unfortunate? It makes the case as to why passing the
| infrastructure bill was so important. It should make people
| think twice about reelecting those who voted no on the bill. If
| they had their way we'd still have a collapsed bridge and no
| infrastructure bill to pay for a new one.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Of the $1.2 trillion, less than half ($550 billion) is even
| intended for infrastructure at all. Of the $550 billion, only
| $110 billion is for actual roads, bridges, and major
| infrastructure projects. That we have to spend $1.2 trillion
| to get $110 billion in possible improvements is exactly why
| our infrastructure is in terrible shape, and still will be in
| terrible shape after this grift is distributed. The
| infrastructure bill just highlights the problem, and puts us
| further into debt.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/28/politics/infrastructure-
| bill-...
| ineedasername wrote:
| No, it's all infrastructure. The rest of the money is
| funding previously authorized plans. I'm not sure why that
| bill was necessary to find them separately from the
| original auhorization, but it's all still infrastructure.
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanp
| o...
| evan_ wrote:
| > Of the $1.2 trillion, less than half ($550 billion) is
| even intended for infrastructure at all.
|
| Citation needed
| ineedasername wrote:
| See my sibling comment-- it is actually all
| infrastructure, there's some idiosyncracy over how
| previous plans are only now being funded.
| ineedasername wrote:
| The collapse is unfortunate. (I don't use "tragic" since it
| appears the were no deaths yet)
|
| The timing, if it was going to happen anyway, is useful. But
| the whole entire situation is bad, so I'm not going to use
| any positive language to describe it even if this incident
| has a silver lining.
| ada1981 wrote:
| Curious on liability here. If a bridge collapses is the
| municipality liable for repairs to your car / medical?
|
| Do you assume this risk when you drive that infrastructure
| failure is your liability?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Interesting question. I would think the courts would come into
| play. I assume failure to maintain or close the bridge when
| they knew of the poor rating would constitute negligence on the
| part of the city. I think we would have to know what the
| weights of the other vehicles are to see if the weight limit
| was exceeded.
| nemacol wrote:
| Any chance people were under there? A park bridge in the winter,
| I wonder if any homeless were around.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| There generally aren't any homeless in Frick park. Under that
| bridge is a dog park, but this was 7am with around 1deg
| weather, so probably not.
| clone1018 wrote:
| Somewhat ironically, President Biden is scheduled to be about 3-4
| miles away this afternoon to discuss the infrastructure plan
| focused on repairing America's infrastructure. With over 400+
| bridges in the City of Pittsburgh, it feels like it's only a
| matter of time.
|
| This particular bridge is known as the Fern Hollow Bridge, I've
| driven over it probably hundreds of times and walked under it
| hundreds more. It always felt... temporary.
|
| Here's Google Street view of underneath the bridge:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4394129,-79.9003702,3a,75y,2...
|
| Here's the bracing underneath the Fern Hollow Bridge:
| https://bridgehunter.com/photos/40/56/405643-M.jpg And here's
| another similar bridge in a nearby Schenley Park:
| http://pghbridges.com/pittsburghE/0589-4477/schenley0695.jpg
| perihelions wrote:
| Your last example has its own Wikipedia page -- it was built in
| 1897 (!)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenley_Bridge (*not* the
| collapsed bridge)
| thakoppno wrote:
| Wonder if the original route of his motorcade would have
| crossed this bridge?
| carols10cents wrote:
| No. This was released yesterday:
| https://pittsburghpa.gov/press-releases/press-releases/5590
| daveevad wrote:
| Additionally, it appears a route from Allegheny County
| Airport to Mill 19 would not have crossed the bridge in
| Frick Park.
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/9UF4kL1bxNvAFjx96
| peteradio wrote:
| Wow what is even holding that up (well of course nothing
| anymore)? Its purely planer apart from those stilts, did the
| bridge just give out or did the stilts lose a footing?
| clone1018 wrote:
| Check out this 2018 photo of the footing... spooky!
| https://twitter.com/gpk320/status/1078885655634157569?s=21
| peteradio wrote:
| That leads to a closed incident report whose only history
| is its creation. You'd think the history of a closed
| incident might have more detail.
|
| Bridge collapse are so jarring especially when the post-
| mortems are like "ya we just didn't fix it while it was
| falling apart and now its fallen down". How often does it
| come down to rusty parts? I guess this is sort of a new era
| of learning for our generation of Engineers. "This is what
| a bridge looks like thats about to fall"
| yohannparis wrote:
| And it started! The collapse of the US infrastructures. They need
| to reinvest continually, not every 20 years with big trillion
| dollars programs.
| Phurist wrote:
| Midterm elections maybe
| Victerius wrote:
| Bridges have been collapsing in the United States for decades.
| Life just goes on.
|
| You almost sound happy at the prospect that one day, thousands
| of bridges are going to collapse all at once.
| yohannparis wrote:
| I'm not happy about any of those, it's a weird claim to infer
| from my comment! I wish this fight against public good
| stopped in the USA, money spent on public services in
| infrastructure are good for everyone.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If you live in the state, this is not a surprising story.
| Residents are well aware of huge number of bridges rated as poor
| or requiring maintenance. Not to mention the terrible condition
| of many roads. Granted PA is one of the states with the most
| miles of roads. One would think that one of the highest gas taxes
| and hundreds of millions in funding from the turnpike would be
| sufficient...
| exhilaration wrote:
| As a PA resident, I've been hearing one of many reasons for the
| poor infrastructure is that a fairly big chunk of the road and
| bridge maintenance budget is being redirected to the State
| Police: https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/lehigh-
| county/2019/04/42-bi...
|
| What happens in town after town is that the anti-tax folks
| decide that there's no need to fund a local police department
| when the PA State Police is obligated to take over policing.
| There's currently no mechanism for the state to charge these
| towns for this service and their state reps fight any effort to
| put one in place. So year after year the State Police's budget
| grows out of control and infrastructure funds are an easy way
| to cover the costs.
| giantg2 wrote:
| True, they need to figure out state police funding. I wonder
| how much they pay out in law suits.
|
| I don't like the per capita fee structure proposed. PSP
| routinely operate in municipalities that already have police
| forces. If they want to make it more "fair", they should
| charge municipalities based on the number and/or type of
| call, regardless of whether they have a police force.
|
| There seem to be many of these funding oddities in the state.
| For example, dept ag complains that they can't fund dog
| wardens, so they want to increase license costs. Yet the law
| caps the amount of funding they can get from enforcement (I
| think the rest goes to the general fund). It would make sense
| to uncap the amount they get from enforcement. They would
| likely still need to increase license cost. But maybe they
| would actually do their job. We had a problem with a dog and
| found out it wasn't even licensed ($300 fine; the other party
| was the one who wanted to get the law involved, yet they
| didn't have a license). When I reported it to the dog warden,
| they _laughed_ and didn 't care. That's your _job_ and you
| _laugh_. WTF do you actually _do_?
| myhikesorg wrote:
| I remember hiking under this bridge - it's a nice park but often
| this area was super crowded on nice days during warm weather.
| Lots of people with their dogs. In the years I lived in PGH I
| always thought about how it was just a matter of time before a
| bridge would collapse - there's an insane amount of bridges
| throughout the city and just by the looks of some of them,
| gravity was going to win sooner than later. It's amazing that no
| one was killed, glad it wasn't the middle of the Summer when
| Frick Park is full, it could have been a lot worse.
| e_commerce wrote:
| WalterBright wrote:
| A bridge in Kenmore (near Seattle) collapsed two years ago.
| They've been rebuilding it constantly for 2 years now.
|
| For perspective, the first transcontinental railroad was built by
| hand in 6 years, for 1900 miles, including a large number of
| bridges.
| voakbasda wrote:
| For further perspective, over a thousand individuals died
| during the construction of the transcontinental railroad. OSHA
| might have reduced the death count, but that comes at the
| expense of efficiency. Compound the endless other regulations
| implemented since that time, and it's surprising that anything
| gets built at all anymore.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 20,000 people died on the Oregon Trail, it's predecessor.
|
| The thousand deaths is a claim that has never been verified.
| https://www.iccsafe.org/building-safety-journal/bsj-
| dives/th...
|
| I couldn't find a reference to how many people worked on the
| railroad, other than 20,000 Chinese. I suppose it was likely
| on the order of 50,000 people. When you have 50,000 people
| for 6 years, some of them are going to die no matter what.
| Disease was common and untreatable, and medical care was
| poor, too, in those days.
|
| In other words, without context, saying 1000 people died is
| meaningless.
| daveaiello wrote:
| I believe my family and I drove over this bridge, when we were in
| Pittsburgh 4 years ago.
|
| I hate to say this, but the condition of bridges like this is one
| of the major reasons that Pennsylvania currently has one of the
| highest gas taxes in the country.
|
| And whatever PennDOT is spending the tax money on, this bridge--
| in one of the two largest cities in our state-- collapsed anyway.
| smitty1110 wrote:
| Come on, we know they spent it on the perpetual projects on the
| PA Turnpike. Not sure about the eastern half of the state, but
| Philly probably gets more money than Pittsburgh. At least the
| fixed the Greenfield Bridge[1].
|
| [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_Bridge
| giantg2 wrote:
| The Turnpike funds itself, _and_ is required to give the
| state hundreds of millions to fund other projects.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Such a useless article by itself, and shows lack of engineering
| experience in HN.
|
| Lacking crucial details:
|
| 1) Inspection Data (When last inspection, any indications of
| stress fractures, etc etc)
|
| 2) Original Estimated Lifetime at expected loads
|
| 3) Real World Loading Data
|
| 4) Updated Estimated Lifetime Following Real World Loading data
|
| It almost impossible to make any judgements about failure
| conditions without data. 'Bridge Failed" by itself is useless
| DocTomoe wrote:
| You could argue that the data is irrelevant for this initial
| discussion, because somewhere along the way, something went
| wrong, or the bridge wouldn't have collapsed. Someone is
| responsible, and I am sure the appropriate organizations will
| investigate the data to find out whom to blame this on.
| jaclaz wrote:
| This is a news article, not the NTSB final report.
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| The condition of the bridge was rated "Poor" in 2017. To
| understand what "Poor" can mean, here's a photo taken from
| underneath the bridge in 2018:
|
| https://twitter.com/gpk320/status/1078885655634157569
| quasse wrote:
| Wow, I wonder if the "Service Request" that came out of that
| tweet being marked Closed meant they ever fixed that:
| https://pittsburghpa.qscend.com/311/request/view/?id=ea13511...
|
| My guess is no.
| lolpython wrote:
| I live in Pittsburgh and it is fairly common for 311 requests
| to be marked Closed without any resolution or follow up
| communication.
| StephenSmith wrote:
| I used to live next to the bridge mentioned here by John Oliver.
| Pittsburgh is something.
|
| https://youtu.be/Wpzvaqypav8?t=447
|
| "One of these arch bridges actually has a structure built under
| it to catch falling deck ... see that structure underneath it,
| they actually built that to catch falling concrete." ... "They
| built a bridge under the bridge..."
|
| They've since repaired this one.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| A deck will be replaced several times over before the bridge
| is. A little bit of stuff falling onto a roadway below can
| cause a lot of mayhem. On boring overpasses they stick boards
| across the bottom flanges of the I-beams. On fancier types of
| bridges they have to come up with more elaborate ways to catch
| stuff.
| XnoiVeX wrote:
| I checked the TxDOT bridge report out of curiosity.
|
| "Out of 55,000 Bridges in Texas, Only 787 (1.4%) are in Poor
| Condition--much lower than the national average.
|
| https://ftp.txdot.gov/pub/txdot-info/library/reports/gov/bri...
| version_five wrote:
| In Montreal, all of the bridges are in terrible condition, in
| part because they were built by the Mafia but also because of
| the weather and the road salt. This is probably st least in
| part responsible for the difference between Pennsylvania and
| Texas, though the states' finances and management of course
| also play a role.
| tarr11 wrote:
| List of bridge conditions by state
|
| https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/no10/condition21.cfm
| quasse wrote:
| I notice that several people are bringing up Texas bridges in
| this thread for some reason.
|
| One extremely major difference between bridges located in
| Pittsburgh and Texas is that Texas does not need to salt its
| roads. Municipalities that salt their bridges are literally
| demolishing them with chemicals.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| As someone from Pittsburgh now living in Texas this thread is
| wild indeed.
|
| Infrastructure is not simple, and localities have different
| challenges. Sure, Texas may have bridges in better
| conditions, but when the snowstorm hit last year I didn't go
| running around saying "Dang the city of Austin has only one
| snowplow?"
|
| (Okay, actually I did, but only as a "that makes perfect
| sense, no wonder this snowstorm hit so hard here even though
| it didn't seem bad by my standards, we have no infrastructure
| or general cultural understanding of what to do, it makes
| sense that this is a terrible storm here even if it wouldn't
| have been a big deal back home.")
| holmium wrote:
| Really, what does the conditions for bridges in the largest
| state in the continental US, in the South, with one of the
| highest rates of population grow in the US have to do with a
| small city in the Northeast that has, in the last 50 years,
| lost its huge industrial base and halved its population?
|
| Well, other than a very roundabout warning for Texas to
| continue to invest in their infrastructure even if the oil and
| refinery money starts to go.
| [deleted]
| pupdogg wrote:
| US is set to collect approx. $3.86 trillion in taxes this year
| and 18.5% ($715 billion) of it is allocated for military budget
| and 1.3% ($51 billion) of it will be handed-out as Foreign Aid to
| other nations while another 8% ($300 billion) will be used to pay
| interest payments on our national debt. Only 3% ($115 billion) is
| allocated to modernize the bridges, highways, roads, and main
| streets that are in most critical need of repair. Maybe the
| government is the largest/legal ponzi scheme after all.
|
| Edit: I provided a wrong figure earlier for Foreign Aid. As per
| @whatkim, the correct amount should be approx. 1.3% ($51 billion)
| for 2021.
|
| You can see a complete categorical breakdown here:
| https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
|
| Still, there are a few areas of concern:
|
| 1. Income Security > Other Income Security $831 billion
|
| 2. Education is 41% of the military budget! $296 billion
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| "Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give
| money to the rich people of a poor country"
|
| --Michael Parenti
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Your $300 billion number just isn't true. If you're looking at
| that Forbes article, well, it covers 6 years. So it's only $50
| billion a year. About 30% of _that_ you 're counting twice
| because that was money from the US military budget they spent
| on foreign aid. So, a bit under a whopping $35 billion a year,
| or less than 1% of either tax receipts (which are actually over
| 4 trillion) or less than 0.5% of the US budget itself (6.8
| trillion)
|
| 0.5% not 8%. These numbers are _very_ different.
|
| Although this bridge seems disconnected from the highway
| system, so I'm not even sure the US government even funds it at
| all.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I mean, building all that car-centric infrastructure was always
| going to be unsustainable in the long run.
| bitexploder wrote:
| It really is sustainable, though. This take has been going
| around for some time and I think it is pretty wrong headed.
| (1) we seem to pay more for roads than any other
| industrialized nation and (2) infrastructure of all kinds,
| including roads, is criminally underfunded in America, as the
| parent was pointing out
| dashundchen wrote:
| Sprawl has thinned out development to the point that tax
| revenues from low-density cities can't support the
| crumbling infrastructure that has been built for it.
|
| Over the past 50 years, Pittsburgh and other similar cities
| have tripled their developed areas while the region's
| population remains flat. That's a lot of additional
| infrastructure - roads, sewers, power, water and gas lines
| - to maintain without new revenue to maintain it.
|
| Strong Towns has referred to this as the "growth ponzi
| scheme" and it's only going to get worse as population
| growth slows in this country.
|
| https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
| bitexploder wrote:
| Strongtowns is just wrongheaded too. I have seen several
| articles debunking this one recently. I don't think it is
| a growth ponzi scheme for several reasons. It gets
| referenced here a lot, but it isn't very credible when
| you dig into their figures and math.
| dashundchen wrote:
| Would you happen to have the rebutting articles? I'd be
| curious to hear their criticism.
|
| To me it adds up. I live in the a city that's sprawled
| without growth. I see the lifecycle
|
| 1. Used to be a dense city with most houses being
| doubles, and 3-5 story apartment buildings.
|
| 2. Built area has tripled since 1970 into mostly SFH
| suburbs, but population is the same
|
| 3. Outside the very newest suburbs, infrastructure has
| decayed tremendously. Taxes haven't really increased, the
| only time sewers or roads ever get repaired is with
| grants from the feds.
|
| It happened to the city and now it's happening to the
| post-war suburbs.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| If you've seen several articles recently I would like to
| see one.
| __alexs wrote:
| > 8% ($300 billion) of it will be handed-out as Foreign Aid to
| other nations while another
|
| And how much of that $300 billion is actually just serving
| intelligence goals?
| colpabar wrote:
| Who cares? The point is that 8% of US taxpayer money goes
| outside the US. Why shouldn't I be upset about that, or at
| least question it?
| fatbird wrote:
| Most U.S. foreign aid is credit to be spent with U.S.
| defense manufacturers. In other words, "foreign aid" is a
| way to hand out U.S. hardware to allies or those for whom
| it's an effective bribe. The best example of this is Egypt,
| which has enjoyed ~$3B annually in U.S. gear as the payoff
| for making and keeping peace with Israel since the Yom
| Kippur war in 1973.
|
| So the money does stay in the U.S., at least.
| colpabar wrote:
| I don't really consider money going from my pocket, to
| Egypt, then to the US military industrial complex as
| "staying in the US." My taxes should go to things that
| benefit _me_ and other regular citizens, not war
| profiteers.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| US citizens enjoy a lot of wealth that was extracted
| (sometimes very violently) from the rest of the world, and
| you could make the argument that maybe the US citizens
| should give something back to the people whose exploitation
| they enjoy.
|
| But in this case "foreign aid" seems to mean mostly
| "weapons for dictators", so it doesn't look like a
| constructive use of the funds.
| __alexs wrote:
| You definitely should question it. The US had the highest
| foreign aid budget in the world but little to show for it.
|
| If you are an effective altruist and want foreign aid to
| benefit the world, you should be concerned that it's
| funnelled to defence contractors instead.
|
| If you just think the US wastes too much money on it's
| military you should be concerned that they are sneaking
| more money to defence contractors under the guise of
| humanitarianism.
| nitrogen wrote:
| If foreign aid is more affordable than foreign
| intervention, it could be an effective way to reduce
| military spending.
| colpabar wrote:
| > reduce military spending
|
| We could also just stop meddling in other countries'
| affairs so much.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Think of all the politicians, lobbyists and their
| families that depend on bribes from foreign entities to
| survive, you heartless monster!
| [deleted]
| User23 wrote:
| A lot of it is just backdoor appropriations to defense
| contractors. The aid is expected to be spent on materiel from
| US companies.
| hyperpape wrote:
| What is your source for the foreign aid number (or any of your
| numbers, though defense and interest sound right to me)? Quick
| googling hasn't let me confirm that, and it sounds high, my
| recollection was that it was more like 1%.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Yeah kinda puts the BBB bill in focus doesn't it. A bit of an
| own goal not investing in infrastructure there.
| ars wrote:
| No, the infrastructure bill was bipartisan and it passed.
|
| Pittsburgh got a lot of money from it for this kind of thing,
| although there obviously wasn't time to do anything yet.
|
| The BBB bill wasn't for this, it was social spending.
| whakim wrote:
| Whatever you think of foreign aid, US foreign aid spending in
| 2021 was $51bn, not $300bn [1].
|
| [1] https://foreignassistance.gov/
| lanstin wrote:
| Think that $300 Billion is over multiple years. E.g.
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/08/04/new...
| has $300B over six years, or between 1 and 2 percent.
|
| So in fact, if your other number is correct, about 1/2 of the
| bridge budget.
| nightski wrote:
| It's usually not federal money that pays for this stuff though
| (at least directly).
| brightstep wrote:
| The argument is it could or should be. It has in the past.
| nightski wrote:
| I must of missed the actual argument because I can't find
| where it was made other than complaining about a 3%
| allocation which is explained due to the large state & city
| budgets for this type of thing.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Then vote in politicians who supports your views
| MattGaiser wrote:
| If you ever own a condo, you will realize that an
| extremely large number of people won't even vote to fund
| the infrastructure that supports their bedroom.
|
| Infrastructure is theoretically already popular but most
| would put it off for a few extra dollars.
| rwmj wrote:
| The BBC recently had a programme about the Genoa bridge collapse:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0007mxm
| jrlocke wrote:
| Unbelievable photo of the decrepit state three years ago:
| https://twitter.com/gpk320/status/1078885655634157569
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I'm just guessing, but it seems like the bus by itself was
| probably between 40% and 80% of the rated load of the bridge
| (buses have remarkably variable weight). Add in some snow and ice
| and I can see how it became overloaded.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Commenters in this thread are making a lot of generalizations
| about tax structures and so on, but it important to keep in mind
| this is a special case at a number of levels. Pittsburgh has an
| unusually large number of bridges. These bridges were built
| during times of relative wealth when the local steel and related
| industries were doing well. Since the decline of American
| industry Pittsburgh has scaled way back and had to rebuild itself
| as a medical and technology center. This recovery is mostly a
| success story, but the infrastructure cannot be maintained. For
| example, the greater Pittsburgh area has some of the first
| suburban areas to be completely abandoned with services
| withdrawn, Penn Hills being a poignant example of this. Obviously
| no bridges should be coming down, but there is a real problem
| here of how to build and maintain a modern city that is smaller
| than the older one that it replaces.
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| What a tragic white elephant of a gift.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Obviously no bridges should be coming down, but there is a
| real problem here of how to build and maintain a modern city
| that is smaller than the older one that it replaces.
|
| If an area's population shrinks such that it doesn't need /
| can't afford all of its bridges, why not prioritize the
| critical bridges for maintenance and close the others as they
| become unsafe. Why is this always posed as a dichotomy between
| letting bridges fail and funding maintenance for each and every
| bridge?
| burlesona wrote:
| The politics get nasty real fast. Nobody wants the bridge
| they regularly use to be shut down, regardless of whether the
| number of regular users is very small. In US politics,
| _especially at the local level_ a fiercely-motivated vocal
| minority is very powerful (because hardly anyone else pays
| attention).
| double_nan wrote:
| I'd say bad publicity. People are afraid of hard
| conversations and US politicians doesn't have any incentives
| to treat the voters are adults. Politicians treat ppl as
| children at best and cattle at worst. No one asks children
| what compromise to make: to buy bread or to buy milk if money
| are running low. This is the root cause of the problems from
| my point of view.
| [deleted]
| voisin wrote:
| > These bridges were built during times of relative wealth when
| the local steel and related industries were doing well.
|
| This is a problem that needs to be solved everywhere.
| Governments build infrastructure with nothing but hope that
| future tax revenue will support maintenance. There should be
| something like a retirement plan for this infrastructure where
| a certain amount is invested at the time of construction to
| support maintenance ongoing.
| acdha wrote:
| The problem is that the entire car hyper-focused model is
| unsustainable. Cities are expected to maintain huge amounts
| of infrastructure for people who don't pay much, if anything,
| in taxes for it but since cars don't scale well there's a
| constant demand for even more expansion.
|
| Recognizing that involves telling a lot of people that they
| need to switch from driving cars to using transit, biking,
| etc. and there are a lot of people who don't want to hear
| that, especially if most of their personal net worth is
| equity in a building which is too far away at anything less
| than freeway speeds. It's much easier just to keep pretending
| that a one-time tax or bond issue will solve it, and so we
| keep doing the same cycle over and over again.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There's nothing about using transit that would decrease the
| number of bridges in a city like Pittsburgh. The transit
| needs bridges to cross rivers and hollows too.
|
| An awful lot of these bridges started as footpaths and ox-
| cart turnpikes.
| acdha wrote:
| The question is twofold: how many bridges do you need
| with much better efficiency? A two lane bridge with buses
| costs less than the 10 lane car bridge you need to carry
| the same number of people.
|
| If you go on a road diet your maintenance costs go down
| because you're building fewer lanes, not having tons of
| bypasses and bridges which exist only to take pressure
| off of congestion at chokepoints, etc. Those reductions
| mean you can spend correspondingly more on the necessary
| core infrastructure.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Broadly-speaking yes, but none of that would have
| addressed this collapse. This was a two-lane bridge
| between two major neighborhoods. People need to get to
| those neighborhoods and they'd have to divert about a
| mile north to do it without this bridge.
|
| Pittsburgh is built at the intersection of three rivers
| and atop the folded spine of the Alleghenies. Any way you
| slice it that city's gonna have either a lot of bridges
| or a lot of grumpy people who can't get anywhere.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Isn't this bridge four lanes?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Two lanes on each side + protected sidewalk on each side,
| yeah.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > the entire car hyper-focused model is unsustainable
|
| I disagree. There's nothing magic about the car. What is
| unsustainable is not budgeting for real costs nor planning
| for the future. E.g. we install pipes that are supposed to
| last 100 years, which just means that everyone alive
| figures they can ignore it and let the people three
| generations from today figure out how to deal with it.
| acdha wrote:
| Cars aren't magic but they're very inefficient.
| Supporting the model where everyone owns a car and drives
| themselves around means that each person uses hundreds of
| square feet of road, buildings are usually required to
| maintain hundreds of square feet of car storage space per
| resident, business are often required to pay for storage
| as well (even if it's something like a bar which we
| really shouldn't have people driving to), and the high
| safety risks mean that beyond the basic road itself you
| end up with a lot of expensive dedicated infrastructure
| which is protecting people from cars or reducing
| congestion.
|
| All of that adds up to a lot of built-in carrying cost
| that people don't see directly but requires upfront
| payment and ongoing maintenance. Owning a car isn't just
| the $10-12k average annual expense but also things like
| paying a double-digit percentage more for housing to get
| off-street parking, having all of the prices at local
| businesses be higher to subsidize the bundled parking,
| etc.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This viewpoint makes sense for dense urban areas where
| space really is at a premium, but most of the united
| states is sparse and land is relatively cheap.
|
| > Owning a car isn't just the $10-12k average annual
| expense but also things like paying a double-digit
| percentage more for housing to get off-street parking
|
| I'm very skeptical of these figures. $10-12K is more than
| I'll pay for my brand new Tesla, and it's a hell of a lot
| less than that when you amortize those figures over its
| expected lifetime. Yeah, there's also the cost of fuel
| and maintenance, but I'm very skeptical that these costs
| added onto the car payment bring the cost up to $10k on
| average. Moreover, the _average_ cost isn 't very useful
| --it's influenced by people like me and people even
| wealthier than me who can afford to splurge. It doesn't
| tell you anything about the actual cost required to own
| and maintain a car--chip shortage aside, a used Toyota
| Camry with decent miles probably costs about $10-15k
| _total_ and amortized over its ~20 year lifetime
| including fuel and maintenance it 's probably on the
| order of $2k/year. And of course, if we're worried about
| people who can't afford that, as with anything, the
| government can subsidize those people.
|
| Similarly, off-street parking isn't an issue outside of
| large cities (virtually everyone else has a driveway, and
| the minimum viable cost of maintaining a driveway isn't
| anywhere near $1k/year).
|
| Ultimately, this conversation illustrates one of the
| major problems with federalizing infrastructure. You get
| people from urban centers making policies based on
| incorrect assumptions about other areas of the country.
| acdha wrote:
| > I'm very skeptical of these figures. $10-12K is more
| than I'll pay for my brand new Tesla, and it's a hell of
| a lot less than that when you amortize those figures over
| its expected lifetime.
|
| Here's the source:
|
| https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/average-annual-
| cost-...
|
| The big things people forget is the cost of insurance in
| addition to consumables and depreciation.
|
| > Ultimately, this conversation illustrates one of the
| major problems with federalizing infrastructure. You get
| people from urban centers making policies based on
| incorrect assumptions about other areas of the country.
|
| Note that the vast majority of the population lives in
| areas where this is an issue. The number of people who
| are truly rural is a lot smaller than the number of
| people who live in cities or their suburbs and still end
| up paying for things like parking.
|
| My position isn't that someone should _ban_ cars but that
| we stop heavily subsidizing them and start factoring in
| pollution, too. There a ton of problems which could be
| solved quickly by market pressure but we've been really
| resistant to that as a society because it means
| rethinking the dominant view of the American ideal from
| the 20th century. A suburban house costs more due to all
| of the infrastructure requirements amortized over fewer
| residents but a lot of policy decisions have allowed
| people not to see that until the maintenance bill
| eventually comes due.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Here's the source
|
| The headline stipulates "new vehicles" and the figure it
| cites is $9,282 (outside of the $10-12K range). The
| article isn't dated, but I assume it's referencing some
| time period during the pandemic in which car prices are
| unusually inflated due to supply chain issues--the figure
| for a normal year is almost certainly going to be lower
| than this (at least when adjusting for inflation). This
| is even less useful than the overall average car payment
| since it's even more biased toward affluent Americans.
|
| > The big things people forget is the cost of insurance
| in addition to consumables and depreciation.
|
| Yeah, I forgot insurance too, but that's $1200/year for
| my brand new Tesla in a major metropolitan city. I'm
| pretty sure full coverage for our hypothetical used Camry
| is going to be closer to $300/year, bringing the figure
| up to the ~$2300/year range (still a far cry from
| $10-12K).
|
| > Note that the vast majority of the population lives in
| areas where this is an issue. The number of people who
| are truly rural is a lot smaller than the number of
| people who live in cities or their suburbs and still end
| up paying for things like parking.
|
| Agreed that the majority of Americans are either suburban
| or rural; I'm skeptical that suburban land costs resemble
| urban land costs; however, regarding your claim that off-
| street parking costs upwards of $1000/year, according to
| Bloomberg the _total_ cost of _urban_ land for an average
| parking space is only $2000k (obviously there 's costs
| for paving and maintaining, but I doubt the total costs
| come close to $1k/year averaged across the country).
| Ultimately, my point is: "your figures seem off by an
| order of magnitude".
|
| > My position isn't that someone should _ban_ cars but
| that we stop heavily subsidizing them and start factoring
| in pollution, too.
|
| Fully agree that we should factor in pollution, but why
| stop at car ownership? We should factor in the cost of
| pollution to _everything_ , via border-adjusted carbon
| pricing.
| Retric wrote:
| Older cars in rural areas can be a lot cheaper to own.
|
| But, ~10k/year is normal in a city. Don't forget
| ~100$/month in insurance, 100-200+$/month parking,
| ~50-100+$/month property taxes, 100-200$/month in fuel
| etc. Not everyone needs to pay tolls but those add up
| extremely quickly.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| That's the whole point--the economics of urban, suburban,
| and rural areas vary widely. It doesn't make sense to
| impose policies which assume urban economics on suburban
| and rural areas, but that's what tends to happen when you
| federalize things.
| Retric wrote:
| Every state has similar breakdowns so you can say the
| same thing at the state level.
|
| Alaska is thought of as open wilderness with 1.2 people
| per square mile, but 40% of the state live in inside
| Anchorage and 54% live in it's metro area. That's quite
| similar to New York State with 44% living inside NYC.
|
| So, I am not sure what you're feeding about national
| policy here.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| That seems like a good argument in favor of localizing. I
| do agree that urbanization is increasingly presenting
| challenges with respect to governance at the state and
| federal levels, however.
|
| I think there are good reasons to push the responsibility
| up to the state level though--e.g., places with low
| density may lack the funds for even critical
| infrastructure and are too sensitive to small or short-
| lived fluctuations in population. But all states are
| collectively large enough to afford their own critical
| infrastructure.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > double-digit percentage more for housing
|
| I'm skeptical. The most expensive housing in my city is
| in the urban core. Houses a few miles out are much
| cheaper, even if currently overpriced. Everything about
| living in the city is more expensive, too. Friend of mine
| has a 40 year old condo downtown and he pays more than a
| thousand bucks a month in building fees.
|
| You might argue that this is just a sign that the suburbs
| are being subsidized, but I'd argue that it really just
| shows that the budget problem is real, we're not
| correctly budgeting for future expenses. If each
| homeowner also had to drop another 10K+ a year in
| maintenance, suburbia can be maintained indefinitely.
| acdha wrote:
| It does require care to compare true equivalents but
| consider what fraction of your house's land goes to a
| driveway, parking, etc. and if you have a garage, shed,
| etc. how much you pay to build that, maintain the
| structure and roof, etc.
|
| My point really isn't that it's innately terrible but
| that it's mostly hidden so people think of it as free.
| Exposing the total cost makes it easier for everyone to
| reconsider, which is good because climate change means
| we're all going to be forced to make changes.
| brewdad wrote:
| That's just saying the same thing in a different way. It
| is unsustainable given our current model of taxation and
| government spending. Good luck convincing the populace to
| pay significantly more in taxes while the government
| "hoards" their money for some future expense beyond the
| average person's lifetime.
| Kye wrote:
| Georgia uses SPLOSTs for stuff like this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_local-
| option_s...
|
| Here's an example of the result in this local interchange
| conversion from an intersection that wasn't designed for
| all the traffic going through it: https://www.google.com/
| maps/@33.9462412,-83.7533688,476m/dat...
|
| It looks sparse in traffic now, but it used to take 5-30
| minutes to cross!
|
| Another underway closer to Athens: https://www.google.com
| /maps/@33.9400062,-83.7207463,3a,75y,2...
|
| This is part of a years-long project to turn highway
| 316/University Parkway between Athens and I-85 into a
| controlled-access highway to handle the next few decades
| of growth as what used to be sprawl from Atlanta turns
| into major population centers.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| My point is that switching to urbanized infrastructure
| isn't going to suddenly make the population more willing
| to fork out more in taxes. It just moves the problem.
| acdha wrote:
| They will, however, be seeing significant economies of
| scale. A suburban street with 20 houses on it has similar
| maintenance costs to an urban block but the latter
| expense can spread across hundreds of taxpayers and
| living in a city means they need less parking because
| many people don't need a personal car to function.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Recognizing that involves telling a lot of people that
| they need to switch from driving cars to using transit,
| biking, etc.
|
| The issue here is latency, availability, and comfort. Cars
| are great for these three. Can transit compete?
|
| > and there are a lot of people who don't want to hear
| that, especially if most of their personal net worth is
| equity in a building which is too far away at anything less
| than freeway speeds
|
| If you offer them a better investment, they will. But then,
| you will have to convince people who put most of their
| personal net worth into tiny cramped downtown condos that
| it's ok for them to lose it due to the massive amount of
| housing you plan to build.
| voisin wrote:
| I agree that this is the problem. But the problem is
| possible in part because governments are not forced to set
| aside funds for the future maintenance. If they had to fund
| an annuity to cover lifetime maintenance, then the budget
| would prove unattractive relative to public transit
| projects which suffer currently from the appearance of
| higher up-front costs (but most likely have lower total
| lifetime costs).
| autokad wrote:
| governments are going to face huge problems as the world de-
| populates. so much infrastructure and buildings to maintain
| and no one to maintain / use them
| prirun wrote:
| I agree this is a good idea, but history has shown that if
| there is a pile of money sitting somewhere, governments blow
| it, just like many states have blown through public
| retirement funds.
|
| The fundamental problem is that people running governments
| are spending other people's money and they never have a
| problem doing that.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >The fundamental problem is that people running governments
| are spending other people's money and they never have a
| problem doing that.
|
| I would go further and state that voters are spending
| tomorrow's taxpayers' money and they never have a problem
| doing that.
|
| As a politician advocating for paying for things today, you
| are not going to win elections against someone who promises
| to push cash flow into the future and lower taxes today.
|
| Try replacing taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions
| (which can be pushed onto taxpayers decades in the future)
| with purchasing equivalent annuities from an insurance
| company today (which have to be properly accounted for and
| paid for today, requiring higher taxes today).
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| > I would go further and state that voters are spending
| tomorrow's taxpayers' money and they never have a problem
| doing that.
|
| This is what happens to retail politics when the
| population is trained to think for the short term. After
| all (successful) politicians merely follow trends.
| voisin wrote:
| Isn't this a problem that the pile of money isn't ring-
| fenced from the general coffers?
| acdha wrote:
| > The fundamental problem is that people running
| governments are spending other people's money and they
| never have a problem doing that.
|
| This wording makes that seem passive and that's a key gap
| in understanding the problem. Almost everyone has high
| expectations for government services -- they want great
| schools, smooth uncongested roads, safe water, responsive
| police and fire departments, support for their elderly
| friends and neighbors, etc. The problem is that fewer
| people are willing to pay what it takes to actually provide
| those services, and an entire industry of people
| misdirecting attention for political reasons -- e.g. you'll
| hear a lot about wasteful spending for stuff which is like
| 0.1% of the budget but trips someone's political agenda,
| and they won't mention that you could cut that entire
| program and it'd fund 2 extra prisoners in jail or a block
| and a half of street.
|
| The other problem is that a lot of our taxes aren't indexed
| for inflation or have been actively cut. Things like the
| gas tax used to pay for a higher percentage of road
| construction, and the massive tax cuts given to rich people
| have removed a lot of general revenue, and that means that
| a lot of what was previously covered by that revenue now
| has to be paid for in ways which are very noticeable to the
| average voter: property taxes, use fees (as a Californian,
| the example I use is that the UC system had free tuition
| until the 1980s -- that shifted the cost to the students
| which made it FAR more noticeable since it went from what
| you could do with a summer job to the price of a new car
| annually), etc.
|
| All of that tends to mean that a politician who runs on a
| platform of needing to raise taxes to pay for the things we
| all use will likely lose to the one saying they can cut the
| mythical "waste & abuse", and it has to get bad before that
| changes.
| kiba wrote:
| First, we get rid of stuff we don't need. If we don't
| need roads, we don't need as many cars. As Elon Musk
| said, the best part is no part. Cars was a luxury that
| became necessary to live in most places of America.
|
| Then, we can talk about raising taxes and funding enough
| infrastructure.
|
| What we cannot do is fund financially inefficient
| infrastructure.
| brewdad wrote:
| If there is a pile of money somewhere, some politicians
| will choose to cut taxes and "give back" that money for
| political gain as well. Both are a problem.
| jdkee wrote:
| "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants
| to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."
|
| -Kurt Vonnegut
| BurningFrog wrote:
| New shiny projects win elections.
|
| Maintaining existing things instead do not.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| At the risk of seeming callous, I am not convinced it is
| obvious that bridges should never collapse. This is an
| unreachable goal that will just make bridges more expensive and
| create excessive regulation. No artifact of man is 100%
| reliable, the only rational goal is a certain number of
| "nines." The users of a system should decide how many nines
| they are willing to pay for. For me personally, A bridge with a
| 99.9% chance of not collapsing in a given year is good enough.
| cogman10 wrote:
| A rope bridge with wood planks will last as long as someone
| maintains the rope and the planks.
|
| Nobody is advocating that "the perfect bridge" be built. They
| are advocating that already built bridges receive regular
| maintenance.
|
| Expecting that a bridge doesn't collapse is an entirely
| achievable goal. Expecting that a bridge doesn't collapse
| without maintenance is very unlikely.
| [deleted]
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| > At the risk of seeming callous, I am not convinced it is
| obvious that bridges should never collapse.
|
| Nobody is saying that a bridge should last forever. They're
| saying repair it as long as you can, then replace the bridge
| so that a collapse never happens.
| rvs-ie wrote:
| > For me personally, A bridge with a 99.9% chance of not
| collapsing in a given year is good enough.
|
| So you are ok if in a city with 100 bridges there is an
| average of one collapse every 10 years?
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Yes one bridge collapse a decade would be acceptable to me
| provided it keeps the cost down. Other people may be
| willing to pay for more nines, the point is that infinity
| nines costs infinity dollars.
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| Pittsburgh has well over 200 bridges. It'd be a failure
| every 5 years.
|
| Ill stick to our current failure rate, thank you. IT
| "reliability" rates isn't that impressive in other fields
| of engineering.
| syki wrote:
| You are ok with a bridge collapse every 10 years? Do you
| understand how rare bridge collapses are today and that
| this would be a massive increase in the rate of failure?
| throw10920 wrote:
| They were just giving their personal comfort threshold.
|
| I mean, technically, one would need to look at the
| reliability-cost curve. opwieurposiu would almost
| certainly be fine with eight 9's of reliability if it
| only cost twice as much as three 9's. The fact that they
| have a really high risk tolerance in this area don't
| really undermine their general point.
| syki wrote:
| If a person's risk tolerance on something is out of whack
| of what almost everyone else is comfortable with then
| there is a problem with that position. At least as it
| pertains to public policy. I'll rephrase and say that I
| hope OP is not in a position to have his/her views in
| this area become policy.
| dijit wrote:
| Nobody is advocating for object permanence.
|
| People advocate for understood constraints of critical
| infrastructure. Engineers usually have knowledge about
| longevity and reliability of components.
|
| There are examples of man-made systems which absolutely
| require 100% reliability, but those still have lifetimes and
| will be destroyed at some point to be replaced with something
| else[0].
|
| A bridge can be destroyed, but it should not collapse without
| prior warning.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY-XHAoVEeU
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Did you watch this video? Tom claims in the video that the
| barrier is designed for up to a thousand year tide. That's
| essentially the same as the three nines standard I
| advocated.
| throw10920 wrote:
| 100% reliability is physically impossible. "reliability" is
| defined to include resistance to abnormal situations. A
| bridge might be 100% reliable when winds don't exceed
| 100mph...an event that might have a 1% probability per year
| in its area of construction, which is clearly highly
| unlikely, _but still something that is accounted for in
| reliability, uptime, and failure rate metrics_.
|
| I don't even know if you can achieve 100% reliability given
| a set of plausible situations/usage, because you'd have to
| imagine every single possible failure mode for the thing
| that you're building.
|
| That is - the threat of "destruction" proper (which you
| contrasted with "collapse without prior warning") is
| included in the reliability metrics for a device.
|
| The point stands. Nothing that humans build can be 100%
| reliable - the only thing you can do is asymptotically
| approach it.
|
| Now, that said - three nines per year is _way_ too low for
| me, personally. Five nines is more comfortable (and if it
| 's cheap I'd like to go higher).
| omnicognate wrote:
| > Nobody is advocating for object permanence.
|
| I am. People need to understand that bridges continue to
| exist when they're not looking at them.
|
| (Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence)
| mprovost wrote:
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Penn Hills being a poignant example of this_
|
| Link? I'm interested in reading more, but quickly searching
| didn't turn up anything
| RC_ITR wrote:
| I think GP is referring to this resort and not the still-
| functioning inner-ring suburb of Pittsburgh?
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/penn-hills-resort
|
| Weird example, since it's in Eastern PA, despite sharing a
| name with that suburb.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It's been a while, but IIRC, Penn Hills (the one in
| Allegheny county) has seen reduced service from the Port
| Authority over the last 20 years, with many bus lines being
| outright discontinued/consolidated.
| jefftk wrote:
| An abandoned resort doesn't sound like a city abandoning a
| suburban area and withdrawing services?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Yeah but 40k people live in Penn Hills so...
|
| EDIT: Maybe it's this [0], but lol Pittsburgh is not
| unique in having some abandoned homes. Literally every
| municipality ever in history has an area with abandoned
| homes.
|
| [0] https://archive.triblive.com/local/penn-hills/some-
| penn-hill...
| XnoiVeX wrote:
| ineedasername wrote:
| The GP's comment was specific to Pittsburgh, what is the
| narrative that you believe would unfairly catch Texas in its
| net?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Could you please omit swipes from your comments here? You're
| making a good point and the swipe spoils it.
|
| On HN, we want curious conversation in which people are
| thoughtful and respectful toward each other. The idea is to
| collaborate in figuring out the truth together. I know it
| often seems like other people don't care about that, but a
| lot of this is an artifact of the medium, because internet
| comments lack the out-of-band signals that we normally rely
| on to evaluate other people's intentions.
|
| Also, it's easy to perceive (and/or imagine) bad faith in
| others, and difficult to perceive the equivalent in oneself.
| Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear (https://hn
| .algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
| second--shift wrote:
| Doing god's work DanG, thank you. Re-reading some of the
| guidelines myself; it's good to stay familiar to keep HN
| the way it is.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Most bridges in Texas are less than 40 years old and 38% are
| less than 20 years old. This bridge was 50 years old and many
| bridges in Pittsburg are similarly old.
|
| Coincidentally, bridges have a 50-75 year lifespan. It's
| probably on the lower end in areas with tons of cold weather,
| salt and ice. Texas has less deteriorating weather in
| general. Hence the whole "northern cars turn to rust buckets"
| meme.
|
| Also, this corresponds to Pittsburg's heyday being 50 years
| ago.
| lief79 wrote:
| The counting methods of "bridges" don't seem to match between
| the sites.
|
| Pennslyvania's average age of a bridge is over 50 years old,
| where Texas lists only half of their bridges being over 40
| years old.
|
| https://www.penndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/pages/def.
| ..
|
| So Pennslyvania's clearly got a problem, but Pittsburg (and
| the state on the whole) gets more rain and far more snow and
| ice, so even if they were the same age, it doesn't really
| seem comparable.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Texas is also in a lot of places new build. They will face
| the same problems when oil for fuel is obsolete (probably
| within 15 years).
| MandieD wrote:
| _Especially_ when oil for fuel is obsolete because an awful
| lot of my home state's prosperity and thus tax revenue is
| still tied to the oil industry.
| hokumguru wrote:
| Not saying I disagree necessarily but fwiw the weather in
| Texas is quite easier on infrastructure than in PA. Texas
| also hasn't seen the industry woes that other states have in
| the past century. And just because Texas has the most bridges
| of any state doesn't detract from the fact that Pittsburgh
| still has its own high number of bridges.
| nr2x wrote:
| Pittsburgh weather in particular is harder on
| infrastructure than any other city I've lived in.
| notacoward wrote:
| I'd also wonder about the level of diligence applied to
| detecting and reporting such problems in Texas. How many of
| the bridges in Texas are _really_ in better than poor
| condition?
| ineedasername wrote:
| The issue is not unique to Pittsburgh, even if the location has
| its own specific challenges.
|
| More than 30% of US bridges are in need of repair or
| preservation work, and on rating bridges in either "good" or
| "fair" condition, the total bridge population has fewer than
| 50% rated as "good". [0] About 7-8% are rated poor.
|
| [0] https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges/
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The issue isn't unique to Pittsburgh, but the scale is. At
| ~450 bridges, it has one of the highest amounts in the world,
| especially for its size.
|
| (I am from Pittsburgh originally and used to bike over this
| bridge quite often.)
| twic wrote:
| > At ~450 bridges, it has one of the highest amounts in the
| world
|
| This factoid is repeated on many websites - but some hero
| has done the work, and maybe not:
|
| https://nolongerslowblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/what-city-
| has-...
|
| > especially for its size
|
| Okay maybe.
| jyounker wrote:
| Your link shows Pittsburg as number 4, which completely
| validates the statement "At ~450 bridges, it has one of
| the highest amounts in the world."
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Being fourth in total size still counts as "one of the
| highest amounts in the world."
| bombcar wrote:
| It points out an issue, which is "defining bridge". If a
| walking path bridge in Venice collapses it likely will
| barely be news in Venice, whereas this one is bigger news
| because it's a bigger bridge.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I couldn't find ratings specific to Pittsburgh to determine
| what proportion of them fit into the Good/Fair/Poor
| categories. That's what would really be needed to assess
| the scale of the problem for Pittsburgh relative to the
| rest of the country. Although knowing what I do about the
| area I wouldn't be surprised if it is disproportionately
| worse: It's only somewhat recently that it's made a bit of
| an economic comeback from its downtrodden rustbelt days. I
| just wanted to clarify that, as much as Pittsburgh may be
| particularly problematic, its infrastructure issues were
| still replicated across most of the US.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| The bus was over bridge weight.
|
| Before you go trying to fix the bridges, take the time to
| figure out what the problem was.
| brewdad wrote:
| Citation needed.
|
| Are you saying the bus driver deviated from the usual
| route? Did the driver allow more passengers to board than
| is normally allowed? Perhaps a passenger boarded with
| their collection of lead figurines. I don't see how the
| bus could have been overweight without someone knowing
| the risks. It's not an Uber, they know where that bus
| will be traveling every time it leaves the station.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Hard agree that this is "citation needed."
|
| It is the normal route for that bus:
| https://www.portauthority.org/pdfs/112016/61B.pdf (you
| can check the map at the bottom) They run pretty often.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Oh wow, it was the 61B? I used to ride that bus route all
| the time (and 61A/61C) when I was in undergrad.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| yep https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-
| prod/media/7e467cc904ea47...
|
| (from the AP story: https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-
| business-pittsburgh-bri...)
| bombcar wrote:
| I mean in a sense it's clear, there's a collapsed bridge
| with a bus on it ...
|
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26
|
| But if it was _actually_ over the posted weight limit,
| that 'll come out shortly.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > Are you saying the bus driver deviated from the usual
| route?
|
| I didn't say anything like that, no, nor any of the other
| invented things you tried to add to my actual statement.
|
| .
|
| > Perhaps a passenger boarded with their collection of
| lead figurines.
|
| Pew says the average American weighs 181 pounds.
|
| I'm not sure why you think you need lead figurines. Two
| tons, 181 pounds at a time, is only 22 people.
|
| PATransit busses are rated for 42 people plus two
| wheelchair bound people.
|
| This bus is over weight at half load.
|
| Please be less sarcastic. Thanks.
|
| .
|
| > It's not an Uber, they know where that bus will be
| traveling every time it leaves the station.
|
| Yes, that's why I blame them.
|
| .
|
| > Citation needed.
|
| Feel free to look it up.
| saalweachter wrote:
| > ... the 447-foot-long span is rated in poor condition
| and is restricted to vehicles of up to _26 tons_ ...
|
| The weight limit was 26 tons, not 2 tons. My Chevy Volt
| would frequently brush up against a 2 ton weight limit.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > The weight limit was 26 tons, not 2 tons.
|
| 85% of PATransit busses are from the 1996 acquisition
| (Cummins ISL, ISB, IS9; Voith 864; Allison D) those
| busses weigh either 24 or 25 tons. Their other busses
| (except the 28x airport flyer) are heavier. Other than
| the flyers, SEPTA's lightest bus is 24 tons. Some of
| them, like the XE40 or the X12, are significantly
| heavier. About 1/5 of PATransit's fleet is over-weight
| for this bridge without a single person on board.
|
| 26 tons is so little of a load that nobody should ever
| have been sending a bus over it.
|
| The 2 tons is for the human load, above and beyond the
| weight of the vehicle. The vehicle already accounts for
| 24 of the 26 tons, bare minimum by definition.
|
| If it was an XE40, it was two tons over load without even
| a driver.
|
| That is to say, "there's more weight here than just the
| human beings. You should also consider the bus itself."
|
| I did spell this out, but it was in a different comment
| tree. I thought I had here too. Sorry; I could have been
| clearer.
|
| Someone in a different thread pointed out that it was a
| three axle bus. I've been making this case based on two-
| axle busses being too heavy. PATransit's lightest three-
| axle bus is MAN SG 220 GAWR, just shy of 30 tons curb
| weight, which is nearly 4 tons over limit.
|
| Look, if you're from Pittsburgh, the _last_ thing you
| want to do is stand up for PennDOT.
|
| But looking at the numbers, to me, this really looks like
| "too big bus," not "bridge go boom"
|
| Not all infrastructure failures are the fault of the
| infrastructure. Many, maybe even most, but not all. It's
| important to differentiate.
| saalweachter wrote:
| You sound like someone who knows about this, and I'm just
| someone Googling [how much bus weigh], so I'm hesitant to
| keep posting on this topic, but I'm still really curious
| where you're getting these weights from.
|
| All of my Googling keeps turning up weights in the 15-20
| ton range for fully loaded busses, with city busses more
| towards the low end of that range, so I'm curious why
| these busses would be almost twice as heavy.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I'm curious about this, where did you get the info about
| the fleet? Wikipedia suggests that the fleet is almost
| entirely Gillig, but has no citations. I couldn't find it
| on the Port Authority's site either.
|
| > Look, if you're from Pittsburgh, the last thing you
| want to do is stand up for PennDOT.
|
| Agreed, but "runs bus service every ~30 minutes where a
| single bus would make the entire bridge overweight" would
| be an entirely new level of "I can't believe it."
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > Agreed, but "runs bus service every ~30 minutes where a
| single bus would make the entire bridge overweight" would
| be an entirely new level of "I can't believe it."
|
| structural damage is incremental. situations where the
| trigger is dramatically smaller than peak load are quite
| common. consider the florida condominum: it collapsed in
| fair weather, despite that under rain load it would have
| hundreds of tons more support carry. you've seen many
| videos on youtube where a sinkhole opened up under a
| small car on a large road which carries freight.
|
| this is one of the things you're taught very early in the
| relevant schooling.
|
| you've tried to pull my card in fairly aggressive ways
| several times in this thread. it's making me somewhat
| uncomfortable.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I am sorry to make you feel uncomfortable. I am trying to
| make sense of something that happened to something very
| near and dear to me. Not trying to do anything to you.
|
| I asked the question about the fleet not to "pull your
| card" but because I am interested and spent a bunch of
| time trying to find this information and could not, and
| am interested in how you came across it. You started off
| with "look up the weight of a bus" and I that's exactly
| what I tried to do, and what I found is not the same as
| what you're saying, so I asked for where you got your
| data to see if I found bad data or you did.
|
| (And yes, absolutely structural damage is incremental,
| but that's not material to the claim that this bus weighs
| over 26 tons.)
| steveklabnik wrote:
| So, I actually did look this up four days ago, but it
| seems that PennDOT changed their website? https://www.pen
| ndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/Pages/def... Those
| excel spreadsheets don't seem to do anything when I click
| on them.
|
| The note I took was "There are 25,437 bridges in PA.
| 9.59% of them were rated in "poor" condition last month,
| with only 34.37% of them being "good"". The original
| sheet was broken out by county, with Allegheny County
| basically being the same as the city of Pittsburgh in
| this regard.
|
| > I just wanted to clarify that, as much as Pittsburgh
| may be particularly problematic, its infrastructure
| issues were still replicated across most of the US.
|
| Absolutely, it is an issue everywhere for sure.
| [deleted]
| donkeyd wrote:
| This seems like an easy excuse for what happened here. If
| you can't maintain those 450 bridges, then don't keep 450
| bridges. Remove 150 of them and maintain the other 300. You
| can't just ignore 450 bridges and hope nothing goes wrong
| because you can't afford to maintain 450 bridges.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| If you can't afford to maintain them, how are you going
| to afford to remove them?
|
| Can the value of the scrap pay for the cost of removal?
| trashface wrote:
| Some unsafe bridges have in fact been closed. Fetterman
| has a campaign video from 2016 of him driving around to
| several of them. https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status
| /1487099733978095622
| anm89 wrote:
| Pittsburgh lost over half of it's population over a 40
| year stretch starting in the 70s. Blaming them in the
| past for not being able to tell the future doesn't make a
| lot of sense.
|
| When they built these bridges, it probably seemed pretty
| reasonable
| ragebol wrote:
| So, what do you propose? Knocking them down? Put fences?
| Which are you going to do that on? Are you going to fend
| off all the people using those bridges for destroying
| their commute? None of those options are cheap either.
| Even selecting the bridges to keep/not keep takes time
| and effort and thus money.
| ada1981 wrote:
| They could install micro-tolls ie ezpass and charge
| everyone a use fee.
|
| Make some free. Let the communities who need them pay for
| them.
| Xylakant wrote:
| In the town where I'm from in Germany, exactly this
| happened: a major bridge was unsafe - one of two major
| roads leading to the crossing of the river rhine. It was
| closed and torn down, replacement will take a few years.
| In Berlin, one major river crossing was closed because it
| was unsafe, then torn down and replaced. Another was
| severely impacted and partially closed, it's now replaced
| with a temporary bridge. Full replacement is expected in
| a decade or so. People adapt. Life goes on. It's better
| than having the bridge collapse with people on it.
| chmod600 wrote:
| The solutions are easier in a growing city than a
| declining one.
| bmj wrote:
| This very thing occurred in PGH with the Greenfield
| Bridge[0]. This caused significant disruption because the
| bridge spans a major highway to the eastern suburbs. Of
| course, the infrastructure issues with that bridge were
| rather obvious, since chunks of concrete would fall on to
| the highway (necessitating netting to be installed).
|
| [0] http://greenfieldbridge.otmapgh.org/
| shadowgovt wrote:
| How did people in that town pay for tearing down and
| replacing the bridge?
|
| The problem Pittsburgh encounters is even demolition
| costs money. Can't squeeze blood from a stone.
| steve76 wrote:
| ragebol wrote:
| Anything is better than people on a collapsing bridge,
| obviously. But you can only fence it off when you know
| its too bad. Checking that can be very expensive. So if
| you just don't know which of 450 bridges are bad, what do
| you do? Fence them all of and spark at least outrage?
| Safest option. Finding out what to do is already
| expensive
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Here's a tweet with a picture from December of 2018 of
| the bridge that collapsed today, showing a large steel
| beam rusted completely through.
|
| So you could start with the lowest hanging fruit, the
| bridges that are in such bad condition that people post
| pictures of them on Twitter.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| You can start off with warning signs. I doubt bridges
| would collapse if pedestrians or bicyclists use them but
| sings could fend traffic off.
|
| Second, the size of the vehicle is important. Larger
| vehicles like trucks get these poor bridges lifespan
| shortened drastically. Trucks and busses could be
| rerouted on safe bridges and so on.
|
| I generally am not afraid of bridges because they have
| convinced me that they're safe but if a bridge were to
| collapse under me and I'd make it out alive I'd probably
| have a bridge phobia.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| rch wrote:
| I know of a relatively small bridge in rural Ohio that
| simply has barriers placed in front of it. It's still
| walkable.
| brewdad wrote:
| They did the same with an old wooden bridge near where I
| grew up. In the early 80s, you could still drive across
| it. Later they closed it and barricaded it. Eventually in
| the 2000s, they preserved it and built a park around it.
|
| Of course, this bridge only carried about 10 cars a day,
| mostly as a novelty, prior to closing. It's an entirely
| different animal to close a bridge in a major city.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > It's an entirely different animal to close a bridge in
| a major city.
|
| Minneapolis/St. Paul managed to adapt when the busiest
| bridge in the state collapsed.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| I know of a couple of medium-sized bridges in upstate NY
| that have completely collapsed and the state has just
| abandoned them, with some barriers thrown in front and
| that's it. Funnily enough they still show up as routes on
| Google Maps, but OSM has them removed. I decided to leave
| it as is to fight the Google mapping monopoly power.
| steve76 wrote:
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Oh yeah, just knocking down 150 bridges is a very easy
| decision that's going to go over extremely well with the
| local population, certainly not political suicide as well
| as a massive, expensive project in its own right. It's
| not like all those bridges existed for good reason, and
| just getting rid of them wouldn't have massive impact on
| an extremely large number of things about the city.
|
| They absolutely need better maintenance. It's been a
| safety hazard for most of my life. But the solutions are
| not easy.
| trashface wrote:
| I agree, I haven't lived in the 'Burgh for a long time,
| but its geography is basically, lots of little hills and
| a few big ones. Everywhere you look, you are staring at a
| hill. And you are on a hill. Plus rivers. A lot of
| bridges (and tunnels) are needed out there for basic
| navigation.
| TheCondor wrote:
| There is a lot to be learned from this. It's contemporary
| to talk about the boom/bust cycles of fracking towns out
| west. Building a bridge or a nuclear power station is a
| much bigger commitment than simply building the structure
| and getting it operational. It outlasts political memory.
|
| I lived in Pittsburgh and remember one way bridges (like
| a fast path for morning rush hour, but screw getting
| home) and lots of sort of ad hoc things. They never had a
| fire wipe the place out and allow for some replanning or
| long term planning. Worse, if you were to try to knock
| some things down, there is a huge emotional reaction to
| it (the out field walls to Forbes field are still there,
| two stadiums later) I remember the city tax being fairly
| high as well, in many places I think increased mass
| transit (usually costs taxes) plus some tolls or
| something to discourage use on some bridges (read:
| another tax to use the bridge you were taxed to build)
| would make sense. Probably a federal bail out or mass
| closing of bridges are the only options. You are right,
| it's not easy.
| recursive wrote:
| It could well be better to knock some down in an
| organized way. If the alternative is to have committees
| and referendums and posturing until nature decides which
| ones to take.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The devil is in the details. What's "an organized way" if
| not "committees and referendums"? Even just the traffic
| impact studies alone to figure out what would happen when
| taking out each bridge, let alone that very often they'd
| impact each other and so you'd also need to figure out
| what happens with traffic for combinations of bridges,
| seems like a daunting and expensive task to me.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Phase it. You don't have to nominate every bridge and
| start simultaneously. Like you say. Choose a few, remove
| those, then re-evaluate what traffic looks like now.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I wouldn't expect anyone, even the OP, to suggest
| undertaking 150 demolitions simultaneously.
|
| That still doesn't help you decide which bridges.
| hardolaf wrote:
| Pittsburgh itself has actually knocked down quite a few
| bridges over the last 30 years. The suburbs have not as
| they just run out of money.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I'm from up route 28 before I moved into the city,
| PennDOT certainly is always doing quite a bit of work.
| 100% agree that there's been changes to bridges over the
| years. But nothing on the scale of "knock down a third of
| the bridges with no replacement."
| donkeyd wrote:
| > Oh yeah, just knocking down 150 bridges is a very easy
| decision that's going to go over extremely well with the
| local population, certainly not political suicide as well
| as a massive, expensive project in its own right.
|
| I knew this response was coming. However, doing nothing
| isn't an option. I also never said it'd be easy. If you
| can't afford 450 bridges, you need less bridges or more
| money. You can't just ignore the problem.
| duck wrote:
| I think the other option is to just restrict the weight
| limit on these and change bus routes.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Yes, it is something that should be done, and yes, it
| won't be easy. Your comment reflected absolutely none of
| that, and even was arguing against me saying that it
| would be extremely difficult, so it did in fact seem like
| you were saying that this is a simple fix. Heck, you
| didn't even say "figure out how many bridges you can
| afford," but simply "remove 150 of them."
| ada1981 wrote:
| It turns out not only is not doing anything an option,
| it's the option that has been selected.
| ravitation wrote:
| I'm amused that people are willing to contextualize this
| bridge failure within what is essentially the entire 20th
| century economic history of Pittsburgh; and then act like
| that history somehow excuses the complete failure of
| local governments _over that same time period_ to either
| repair or eliminate unsafe infrastructure. It 's honestly
| nothing short of absurd.
|
| No one is honestly expecting the local governments
| throughout the Pittsburgh metropolitan area to eliminate
| 150 bridges (or some other arbitrarily large number) by
| 2023... They expected the local governments (and the
| state and federal governments) to behave competently and
| never let it get to this point. The decline of Pittsburgh
| as an industrial hub started over half a century ago...
| They've had plenty of time to address things like this in
| that context.
|
| The fact that keeping infrastructure safe is "political
| suicide" or "costs too much money" is essentially the
| entire problem - and it's a problem that is not at all
| unique to Pittsburgh.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| One can wish that the city spent less time and money
| building new sports stadiums, spent more time and money
| investing in infrastructure, yet still acknowledge that
| the political reality on the ground makes doing so hard
| to near-impossible.
| ravitation wrote:
| I guess for me, the fact that the political reality makes
| infrastructure "hard" is profoundly obvious... And, while
| the specific details may change with the city, that
| reality is quite common throughout the US (even the
| relatively specific economic conditions discussed earlier
| in the context of Pittsburgh are not really that
| unique)...
|
| Pretending like this type of infrastructure decline is
| somehow unique to Pittsburgh, which, at least implicitly,
| the top level comment does, does a great disservice to
| actually finding solutions to the problems with that
| "political reality on the ground" - and not just in
| Pittsburgh.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| That's fair. I do also agree that it seems obvious, but
| given the number of the people in this thread and
| elsewhere suggesting that fixing it would just simply be
| so easy, it doesn't seem like that's the case for many
| others.
|
| I didn't read the OP as saying "nowhere else has
| infrastructure problems" but "bridges are a particularly
| acute problem in Pittsburgh for these reasons." I would
| certainly agree that suggesting this kind of issue is
| unique to Pittsburgh would be misguided.
| ravitation wrote:
| That's also fair. I think my initial reading of the top
| comment, and some of the replies, was overly assumptive;
| and my take on the nature of the cause was a direct
| result of my already pessimistic view of contemporary
| American political structures.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"However, doing nothing isn't an option."
|
| Cynically, it actually is for a cash strapped
| municipality. If they lack the money for proper
| maintenance - but can afford the bare minimum amount of
| caretaking - they certainly cannot afford the cost to
| dismantle the bridge. They will go with bandaid solutions
| virtually every single time.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| And then get screwed with lawsuit costs and payouts. But
| that's a can they can kick down the road.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| When you go to Pittsburgh for the first time, you will
| learn that the city has 450 bridges because they're
| necessary, and you can't just go eliminating a third of
| them
|
| They can, in fact, maintain the bridges. You might not
| know this from a brief look at a newspaper article.
|
| What happened is that the bus was too heavy for the
| bridge. It's PennDOT's fault.
|
| Look up the weight of a bus. Look up the average weight
| of an American. Look up PennDOT rider numbers. Do the
| math. They were three tons over on a 26 ton limit.
| peapicker wrote:
| "Three-axle 60-ft articulated buses are the next most
| common transit bus in service [in the USA], comprising
| about 10% of the fleet. The curb weights for these buses
| currently range between approximately 38,000 and 50,000
| pounds, and fully-loaded weights range from approximately
| 56,000 to 65,000 pounds." (page iii)[1]
|
| Fully loaded weights for 3-axle US buses from the linked
| report's executive summary are 28 to 32.5 tons, empty
| range from 19 to 25 tons. So a not-fully loaded 3-axle
| bus was very likely over the 26 ton limit.
|
| Three axle buses should not have been on that bridge.
| Would be interesting to see if that route was changed
| recently from 2-axle to 3-axle service.
|
| [1] https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/docs/TCRPJ
| -11Task...
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| oh wow, i hadn't even noticed that it was a three axle
|
| i've been making this argument on skepticism that a _two_
| axle bus should have been on that bridge. the standard
| patransit two axle fleet bus, a cummins isl (which is
| more than half their fleet) is 2 tons shy of max load
| when empty, and average american weight breaks load at
| bus half full.
|
| that's the 61b. when i lived in pittsburgh it was often
| packed to the gills. i have a hard time imagining that
| that has changed.
|
| you're right. if it was a 3 axle, that's very
| significant. hell, an _empty_ three axle (i think they
| use man sg 220 gawr, which is ~30 tons curb weight) would
| likely be too much. i 'm glad you pointed this out; thank
| you.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > i have a hard time imagining that that has changed.
|
| Fun trivia, https://www.portauthority.org/system-map/
| shows stats on this. It doesn't support deep linking, but
| I went to the outbound stop just after the bridge, and it
| says
|
| In FY2021:
|
| Average Weekday Ons: 0.32
|
| Average Weekday Offs: 5.1
|
| Pre-pandemic ridership for CY2019:
|
| Average Weekday Ons: 1.00
|
| Average Weekday Offs: 37.00
|
| It has dropped by quite a bit since the pandemic. The 61A
| has a daily ridership of 1,643 and the 61B has 1,312.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| those are indeed much lower numbers than i had expected
|
| that said, the other person pointing out that it's a
| three axle bus makes me relatively confident that the
| fleet contains no domain-relevant busses that had any
| business going over that bridge in the first place
|
| it's worth noting that when i was growing up, patransit
| tried to send heavy construction trucks across the
| larimer bridge. one of the crew members stopped them at
| the last minute when they saw the bridge and called it in
| (this is way before pocket internet,) and good thing -
| basically this would have happened, and in that case,
| it's a probably five or so story drop onto an active
| highway. would have been a catastrophe.
| joveian wrote:
| From the Post-Gazette article there was a driver and two
| passengers on the bus, so it might not have been over
| limit this time but sounds like it would have been at
| other times on that route.
|
| https://www.post-
| gazette.com/local/city/2022/01/28/pittsburg...
|
| I used to walk under that bridge quite a bit, hopefully
| no one was under it when it collapsed (it doesn't sound
| like they suspect there was, but I guess it could
| potentially be hard to tell).
| Kye wrote:
| What was the limit when the bridge was new?
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| The limit has been 26 tons for almost 20 years now.
|
| I don't know what the limit was originally, but PATransit
| should be able to accomodate bridge limits within two
| decades.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Worth noting that these figures are according to the American
| Road and Transportation Builder's Association, a lobbying and
| advocacy group for the construction and civil engineering
| industry.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| The optics of minimizing their input aren't going to be
| good, even if normal "don't ask the barber if you need a
| haircut" skepticism is applicable.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Yep. There's a balance to be found here. On one hand, a
| group of construction groups and civil engineers likely
| know what they're talking about more than most people, on
| the other hand, massive infrastructure spending that they
| advocate for directly lines their pockets.
|
| It's like when you hear all the engineers and geologists
| at the American Petroleum Institute talk about fracking.
| Maybe we should keep a grain of salt.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Without knowing anything, "needs some repair" and
| "unexpectedly collapses in broad daylight" are very different
| things.
| mmazing wrote:
| Do you happen to know if their dataset is available to the
| public?
| 34679 wrote:
| $250 million for public safety
|
| $59 million for public works
|
| 2021 Amended Operating Budget:
|
| https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/15962_2021_Amen...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| It's not just a "oh whoops the city shrank" problem, it's
| endemic to all American infrastructure. The problem is that
| local governments are permitted to de-prioritize public safety.
| Maursault wrote:
| > there is a real problem here of how to build and maintain a
| modern city that is smaller than the older one that it
| replaces.
|
| I'm nearly certain Pittsburgh itself, the city, and its
| immediate surrounding boroughs has grown in population pretty
| steadily (though not significantly) since the steel boom even
| while the population of it's suburbs (and PA in general) have
| steadily lost population, though some areas around the city
| have grown, like near the airport, property values have
| skyrocketed to the point that I see a real estate bubble
| (cookie cutter single family houses built in the 1960's are
| going for $250K-$350K now, a lot to pay for a 60yo house in the
| burbs), which contrasts the other areas that have been
| completely gutted in population and deteriorated (like
| Ambridge, Aliquippa).
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| Pittsburgh is having a rebirth in the last ten years.
|
| Before that, it was bleeding population for 50 years
| samatman wrote:
| Your near certainty is not justified by numbers which are
| publicly available and could have been consulted.
|
| The population of Pittsburgh proper is half what it was in
| 1950. Here's a convenient tabulation:
|
| http://population.city/united-states/pittsburgh/
|
| You're equally wrong about the suburbs, which have grown as
| the city center shrank.
| syki wrote:
| The population of metro area Pittsburgh has declined in the
| last 20 years and is over 100,000 people less than it was in
| 1970 [1]. Pittsburgh's population today is 10% less than it
| was in 2000 and is considerably smaller than it was at its
| peak [2].
|
| [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23100/pittsburgh/popul
| ati...
|
| [2] https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/pittsburgh-
| pennsylvania
| draw_down wrote:
| curtis3389 wrote:
| Since we're talking decaying infrastructure and Pennsylvania, it
| seems a good time to remind people that US dams need work, too.
|
| A collapsed bridge is nothing compared to a failed dam like the
| Austin Dam failure, which is worth a visit if you're ever in the
| area:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Dam_failure_(Pennsylvan...
| keiferski wrote:
| The Johnstown Flood (also caused by a failing dam) also
| happened nearby.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood
| myhikesorg wrote:
| Great place to explore and it's run by an awesome group of
| people!
| jshprentz wrote:
| The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [1] provides many more photos and in-
| depth reporting.
|
| [1] https://www.post-
| gazette.com/local/city/2022/01/28/pittsburg...
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