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Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

There is a bridge in Flint where the support pillars are held together by giant steel clamps because the concrete is crumbling underneath them. As you go northbound on I-75 and it makes that 90-degree left turn next to some kind of auto plant, there is a 3-level interchange and the support pillars have giant clamps on them. Every time I drive under it, it's a bit of a laugh, but who knows how safe it really actually is.

I don't think that's an exception either. The state of infrastructure in this country is indeed terrible and people have been sounding the alarm since forever, and it just never gets fixed. But there is always money for new tanks that get sent straight to the boneyard, or fighting whatever extremely-important war we're into this year.

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These pillars?: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.9825563,-83.7311805,3a,90y,3...

Yup! That next bridge 100 feet farther north looks even worse too, lol. Don't think you're supposed to be able to see the deck like that.

From what I remember, that set of bridges has had problems with chunks coming off and hitting people as they drive on the highway. A chunk of concrete at 70mph is absolutely lethal.

Those look incredibly spindly and fragile, even if they were in good condition. I don't think I've ever seen a road bridge constructed as delicately as that here in Scotland.

I guess you don't get wind, rain, or snow there.

> I guess you don't get wind, rain, or snow there.

Hahahah. It's michigan. We get some of the more intense winter weather in the states.

That's actually part of the problem, it's an extremely variable climate, we get over 100F in the summer and under 0F in the winter. It results in a lot of road wear compared to more southerly states, due to the freeze-thaw cycle.

The west side of the state is comparable to New York, tons of lake effect snow. No hurricanes here though.

I guess these ones at the Baillieston Interchange on the M8 just outside Glasgow are about as thick, but they're much shorter. Of course down south there at below 56°N the weather's a lot gentler and kinder.

https://goo.gl/maps/MD6ErnBZ4mzDdkup9

If you spin round to look west at the M73 flyover you'll see they're a kind of tapered oval section, but they're also forming a triangle with the road deck which makes the structure a lot stiffer.

I was surprised to discover how much concrete bends when I was doing radio comms work on the Queensferry Crossing project a bit north of Edinburgh. The road deck was built as steel sections with concrete on top and lifted into place, one side then the other. With them "unbalanced", one side lifted on but the other not lifted yet, the top of the 600-foot concrete towers - the top had a working platform about the size of four parking spaces - bent over by about six feet...

I was going to guess the opposite, you're supposed to be able to see the deck but they've stuck a layer under the bottom to keep debris from falling on the road

I wonder how much of the 2 trillion infrastructure bill will actually go to improving infrastructure

>> There is a bridge in Flint where the support pillars are held together by giant steel clamps because the concrete is crumbling underneath them.

They've been replacing a bunch of bridges on I-94 in Detroit. Many of them had lots of rebar showing on the pillars where the concrete had crumbled a way. Not just a bar showing, but a decent sized grid. It doesn't surprise me that a pedestrian bridge got overlooked with all the road bridges in need. Still no excuse.

The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) is doing a terrible job. A recent audit found problems in the way they audit bids for work. I've spoken with people at road construction companies who have told me about changes that make the situation worse than a few years ago for the speed and cost of building roads. Policy things making it slower and more expensive that are baked in to the contracts.

It's not just spending, which isn't efficient. Michigan has been (for decades) on the of the lowest spending states per capita on roads. This is across both Republicans and Democrats in the governor's seat.

No wonder their roads are so bad.

> it just never gets fixed.

Its because public spending on infrastructure is "socialism" and it is better to give loans to private companies and let "the free market" fix the infrastructure; any day now.

Its an unexplained miracle the US hasn't collapsed yet.

It’s starting to. Remember that bridge in Pittsburgh that spontaneously collapsed? I’m sure there are many other lesser known examples.

The PA bridge collapsed despite a recent (couple years prior) gas tax hike that was supposedly going to be used to prevent exactly that kind of outcome.

Throwing money at the problem doesn't work if you suck at throwing and can't hit the problem.

>> Its because public spending on infrastructure is "socialism" and it is better to give loans to private companies and let "the free market" fix the infrastructure; any day now.

nonsense. It's the governments job to do this maintenance. There are entire departments dedicated to it. The problem is that they are underfunded, in part because the money goes ummm somewhere else, and because for some reason taxing people or business enough to cover state expenses is considered bad practice.

Yes, introduce use taxes that fully pay for such infrastructure. Stop overbuilding everything--no reason to make a 4 lane overpass when 2 is sufficient.

What’s the cost difference in % from building 2 vs 4? What happens if in 10 years you really do need 4? Sometimes it’s smart to overbuild things with a long lifespan.

All good questions that are not actually answered when they make those decisions. What does 'need' mean? What is the maintenance cost of maintaining two lanes of road that might be needed in 10 years?

Often road widening is based on projections (which are almost universally wrong): https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2021/09/09/every-traffic-pr...

The post you're responding to was pretty obviously sarcastic... Note their use of quotes around "socialism" and "the free market, and the phrase "any day now".

So the other poster was making the exact same point that you made (unsarcastically), but it sounds like you may not have realized that? At any rate, you both seem to be largely in agreement about the current state of affairs.

Our "state expenses" in no way reflect the immediate needs of the people or any kind of popular democratic will. The average citizen in the US gets extremely little from the state relative to the taxes they pay, so opposing higher taxes is very rational.

Agreed. It's not the amount of taxes per se, it's the (perception of) value. Few are favor of higher taxes because they currently feel that they get (next to) nothing from what they pay now. Who wants to pay more for more nothing??

> Few are favor of higher taxes because they currently feel that they get (next to) nothing from what they pay now. Who wants to pay more for more nothing??

Interestingly, a lot of these people also aren't in favor of paying less for less nothing.

You're going to have to unpack that please. Where are ppl against lower taxes?

If public spending is socialism then why don't states that don't the one party blue states that don't get antsy about "socialism" have great infrastructure?

No blue state is actually okay with socialism at any higher level. The Democrat party leadership hates left-wing politics. Just the other day Pete Buttigieg was trying to explain how we can't solve baby formula problems the socialist way so children have to starve for the sake of factory owners:

> Biden’s secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, has argued that this kind of socialist experiment would be unacceptable — even to stop babies from starving to death. “Let’s be very clear,” Buttigieg told CBS, “This is a capitalist country. The government does not make baby formula, nor should it. Companies make baby formula.”

(For the record, "Socialism" would not fix the US's bridge or baby formula woes because they are both the results of decades of neglect and bad policy that can't be undone in a year.)

I'm also a bit confused why that came up, considering he's head of transportation. Do they also concern themselves with manufacturing?

He had previous in the last couple of days mentioned that him and his husband were unable to find formula for their baby so the question likely came up again since he already had spoken out on the matter. I don't know the context in which it came up days ago. Perhaps it was in a more open ended "get to know" type of interview he was doing.

Biden's approval numbers are absolute garbage - I suspect he'll have a contested run in 2024 (or "voluntarily" decline to run) and all the sharks want to start getting their names in the headlines.

Right now I don’t see any way he’ll run knowing he won’t win.

Hubris is a hell of a drug.

> “This is a capitalist country. The government does not make baby formula, nor should it. Companies make baby formula.”

Singapore would disagree that government manufacture of baby formula represents socialism. The government can do what it wants without impairing the market. Where socialism comes in is when the government intervenes to protect its baby formula industry, by barring competitors from participating in the market or by subsidizing its own formula manufacture with tax revenues.

Are interstates recipients of Federal funding or only state funding?

> If public spending is socialism

It isn't, my comment is a jab on US politics and discourse; though neoliberalism and "minarchism" has corroded the existing infrastructure through "austerity" (money redirection towards forever wars and imperialism) and red-scare tactics.

The Democrats passed $1,000,000,000,000 Dollar "infrastructure" bill, of which 5% of which "went" to roads and bridges, and give the effectiveness of the government spending money, that's about .05% actually making it to the street. So one bridge might get fixed.

Do you have a source for your "5%" claim? That conflicts with what I'm seeing here: https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-does-only-11-percent-bil...

> The 2,702-page bipartisan bill, summarized in a fact sheet issued by the White House, contains $550 billion in new spending, in addition to funding allocated each year for various infrastructure projects. The allocation for roads and bridges ($110 billion), railroads ($66 billion), airports ($25 billion) and ports ($17 billion) alone totals $218 billion, which is just over 18 percent of the overall spending over the 10-year period— significantly higher than the 11 percent touted by Trump.

> An additional $240 billion is going toward upgrading and improving the nation's power grids ($73 billion), water infrastructure ($55 billion, plus another $8 billion for Western water infrastructure in response to ongoing droughts across the West), public transit systems ($39 billion) and broadband ($65 billion). In the past, all of that has typically fallen under the "public infrastructure" umbrella and would raise the share of "real infrastructure" to at least 38 percent.

> The addition of more contentious elements that arguably fall under a looser definition of public infrastructure—such as safety enhancements ($11 billion), electric vehicle charging stations ($7.5 billion) and electric school buses ($7.5 billion), along with $47 billion for cybersecurity and climate change mitigation—would tip the total over 44 percent.

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