Bridge collapse in Pittsburgh’s Frick Park
triblive.com
triblive.com
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.
(I am from Pittsburgh originally and used to bike over this bridge quite often.)
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.
Before you go trying to fix the bridges, take the time to figure out what the problem was.
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.
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.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26
But if it was actually over the posted weight limit, that'll come out shortly.
I didn't say anything like that, no, nor any of the other invented things you tried to add to my actual statement.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Citation needed.
Feel free to look it up.
The weight limit was 26 tons, not 2 tons. My Chevy Volt would frequently brush up against a 2 ton weight limit.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.)
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.
EDIT: Ah-ha, looking at the picture shows it was an articulated bus, and Googling [how much does an articulated bus weigh] gives weights in the range you listed. So yeah, you're right and that bus should not have been going over that bridge.
They absolutely need better maintenance. It's been a safety hazard for most of my life. But the solutions are not easy.
That still doesn't help you decide which bridges.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this a good reason why politics should always include term limits? It would prevent anyone from NOT doing something that is in the good for the constituents, but is seen as "political suicide". Since no one can be in politics long term, you might as well make the tough decisions.
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.
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.
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.
The problem Pittsburgh encounters is even demolition costs money. Can't squeeze blood from a stone.
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.
Minneapolis/St. Paul managed to adapt when the busiest bridge in the state collapsed.
Make some free. Let the communities who need them pay for 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.
I don't know what the limit was originally, but PATransit should be able to accomodate bridge limits within two decades.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
Can the value of the scrap pay for the cost of removal?
When they built these bridges, it probably seemed pretty reasonable
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Then, we can talk about raising taxes and funding enough infrastructure.
What we cannot do is fund financially inefficient infrastructure.
Maintaining existing things instead do not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 $1k/year).
Ultimately, this conversation illustrates one of the major problems with federalizing infrastructure. You get people from urban centers making policies based on incorrect assumptions about other areas of the country.
But, ~10k/year is normal in a city. Don’t forget ~100$/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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An awful lot of these bridges started as footpaths and ox-cart turnpikes.
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.
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.
They could replace the car bridges with train bridges or dedicated bus bridges (after knocking down a lot of houses, which if history repeats itself will be minority-owned houses), but this is a city with a small downtown and uptown where residents have always lived in the suburbs ever since the industrial revolution, well before ubiquitous car ownership.
Residents were using bridges to get to work in the days they walked there. There's sort of a lower bound on how many bridges a city of this geography will have.
This is true but that doesn't mean that the city should go broke catering to their whims — that could be putting tolls on the bridges, encouraging use of transit, etc. but they need some way to balance the budget.
> They could replace the car bridges with train bridges or dedicated bus bridges (after knocking down a lot of houses, which if history repeats itself will be minority-owned houses)
… or simply dedicate a lane for transit. It's not an iron law that the least efficient mode of transportation be given the highest priority.
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.
> The issue here is latency, availability, and comfort. Cars are great for these three. Can transit compete?
It's not that simple: cars are great for those when nobody else has them. When you live in a place with enough people to get traffic, they're terrible on the first two and the third is a question of how bad the outside is and how much you enjoy sitting for long periods of time without moving. Similarly, you need to factor in things like parking: car availability and latency both take a huge hit when you can't park in front of your destination, and comfort takes a hit if that means walking in uncomfortable weather, too.
That makes the underlying decisions more obvious: if you reserve lanes for transit or build separate right-of-way, taking the bus is a lot better than driving because the 50 people on the bus don't have to wait behind the 3 blocks of 50 people driving cars but if you focus on cars, the bus will be stuck in traffic as well.
> 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
There's a lot of hyperbole in that sentence, and it's missing the key point that car travel is so inefficient that this pressure is always there even without overt public policy. Urban living is expensive because people like to live in places with fun things to do (i.e. which improves as a function of density) and they don't spend long periods of time stuck in traffic. Removing the public subsidies for suburban commuters will only make it more pronounced.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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.
I am. People need to understand that bridges continue to exist when they're not looking at them.
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).
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.
So you are ok if in a city with 100 bridges there is an average of one collapse every 10 years?
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.
Ill stick to our current failure rate, thank you. IT “reliability” rates isn't that impressive in other fields of engineering.
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.
Link? I'm interested in reading more, but quickly searching didn't turn up anything
Weird example, since it's in Eastern PA, despite sharing a name with that suburb.
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...
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).
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.
Nonsense. My mistake, but my math is at least good enough to know I was not equally wrong. That would be far too unlikely, but if so, some kind of bizarre coincidence.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23100/pittsburgh/populati...
[2] https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/pittsburgh-pennsylvania
Before that, it was bleeding population for 50 years
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?
$59 million for public works
2021 Amended Operating Budget:
https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/15962_2021_Amen...
It was first rated poor in 2011, from Pittsburgh Post Gazette [1].
The collapse came in the wake of troubling inspections dating to 2011 that show the aging span has been rated in poor condition, according to the National Bridge Inventory.
Records from the inventory show that the bridge was consistently found to be in poor shape during inspections from 2011 to 2017, with estimated repairs at $1.5 million.
Mr. Gainey said the bridge was last inspected in September 2021. A statewide report from last year noted the bridge was still in poor condition.
The repair estimate was $1.5 mil in 2011. As someone posted in another comment, they spend 4 times more on public safety than on public works: $250 million vs $59 million. This seems like a failure of the city and state governments to prioritize. I know that Pittsburg has lots of bridges, but if they can't support it, then they should close some. This issue is neither unexpected, not a global or cataclysmic event. If the city needs constant maintenance help from the Federal government to maintain its infrastructure, then it simply can't afford it.
[1] https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/01/28/pittsburg...
[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/...
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.
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".
The other countries definition seems more analogous to the US Census Bureau metro areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
https://www.wqed.org/watch/pittsburgh-history-series/flying-...
I remember it pretty vividly because the woman who drove over it was on the local news in tears. Could have been much worse.
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.
People won’t fund the infrastructure that supports their bedroom when it comes out of their own pocket.
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...
>"@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
> It was last inspected in September
So hopefully that's been addressed by now?
[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...
Screens of the report (server is slow):
Tool links:
https://gis.penndot.gov/paprojects/BridgeConditionsMap.aspx#
https://gis.penndot.gov/paprojects/Reports/BridgeConditionsR...
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.
https://apnews.com/article/business-lifestyle-681c35ee3afdd4...
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.
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.
Have you been to western PA? (Half serious)
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.
MA bridge condition improved over the past decade fairly significantly, about $3bn was spent on the Accelerated Bridge Program that was authorized in 2008 and concluded around ~2017. You can look at the more details and the results here: https://www.mass.gov/service-details/accelerated-bridge-prog...
Last year's transportation bill (which passed) cues up various additional infrastructure investment, including another $1.25bn for state bridge work (+$70m for small local bridges), and is projected to reduce the % of bridges in poor condition further over the next couple of years.
There are some nice slides here about where things are projected to go over the next few years thanks to that (11 + 14 in particular). Generally speaking, you can expect to see continued improvement in roadway infrastructure in the state. https://files.engineers.org/file/ACECMA-2021-Highway.pdf
And that was all before the federal infrastructure bill.
---------
I am less familiar with PA, but AFAIK they hiked their gas tax significantly to raise infrastructure spending a few years back. Whether it was enough or not I don't know. However, as MA illustrates, it takes a while of making sustained investments to start to see noticeable results and dig yourself out of long-term infrastructure investment deficits.
How do you land on trusting the municipality?
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
> 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.
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.
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)
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...
Congress as a whole? Not so much.
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.
> 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.
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)?
> 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.
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.
[1] https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/01/28/pittsburg...
My guess is no.
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...
Do you assume this risk when you drive that infrastructure failure is your liability?
Would seem insane for the city to just put it on the individual using it.
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
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"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenley_Bridge (*not* the collapsed bridge)
" Greg Kochanski, a software engineer, was walking his dog under the bridge about three years ago when he noticed that one of the X beams that stabilized the bridge was so rusted that it had disconnected from the column to which it had been attached.
"He reported this to the city in a tweet and, several weeks later, he said, noticed that the rusted beam had been removed."
Traffic is going to be an absolute nightmare until they restore it.
Edit: I just checked - it was 447 feet. Height is probably right, but I might be under by a bit.
> Jones estimated that rescue crews had to rappel 100 to 150 feet down the ravine to rescue motorists.
Thankfully below it was a nature trail. Could have been worse if it was one of the bridges over the rivers or highways.
This is the only one that shows the scale: https://assets-varnish.triblive.com/2022/01/4691113_web1_ptr...
[from: https://twitter.com/shadow/status/1487065719028207627/photo/...]
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.
Not as bad as like the fort Pitt bridge collapsing or something, but still a big deal
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.
For perspective, the first transcontinental railroad was built by hand in 6 years, for 1900 miles, including a large number of bridges.
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.
[0] https://www.theonion.com/urban-planner-stuck-in-traffic-of-o...
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…
... 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.
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.
The money available is not a zero-sum game. The US could raise its taxes.
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.
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.
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.
The US doesn't just mean the Federal Government, it means every local and federal authority that runs the country.
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)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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...
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.
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.”)
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.
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
Infrastructure is theoretically already popular but most would put it off for a few extra dollars.
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.
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.
And how much of that $300 billion is actually just serving intelligence goals?
We could also just stop meddling in other countries' affairs so much.
So the money does stay in the U.S., at least.
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.
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.
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.
—Michael Parenti
So in fact, if your other number is correct, about 1/2 of the bridge budget.
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.
https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/former-penndot...
For readers outside of the US, how are similar infrastructure issues?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/28/politics/infrastructure-bill-...
Citation needed
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanpo...
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.
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.
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.
So, 10 people were hurt. But they say none of the injuries appear life-threatening, so there's that.
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
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
You almost sound happy at the prospect that one day, thousands of bridges are going to collapse all at once.