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.)
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That still doesn't help you decide which bridges.
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.
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.
I don't know what the limit was originally, but PATransit should be able to accomodate bridge limits within two decades.
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.
When they built these bridges, it probably seemed pretty reasonable
Can the value of the scrap pay for the cost of removal?
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.