what is the acceptable number of people to die during bridge construction
In Switzerland, arguably the world's experts in tunnel-boring, one death per tunnel kilometer is considered acceptable (and it is often less than that).
The much easier Channel tunnel has had around one death per five kilometer.
The Japanese Akashi Kaikyo Bridge prominently has had no construction deaths, which was considered extraordinary at the time. The Humber Bridge, which was the longest suspension bridge before Akashi Kaikyo, did cost four lives.
Construction is a dangerous business. You operate heavy machinery. You move large amounts of heavy material. You deal with power tools. Death is always a possibility - and that's something we IT folks tend to forget in our clima-controlled environments with our cozy desks and expensive chairs.
How many is it acceptable to die on the job? Well, there's hard stats on that - About 1M people work in construction[1], and about 1000 of them died on the job last year[2]. That'd be about .1% death rate on the job. Is that good enough? Probably not, but it's where we're at and what society accepts.
If 2,000 people worked on the Golden Gate Bridge for five years, it'd be an average construction project. It was a massive undertaking, but apparently poorly documented - There's no record of worker counts[1], but we do know the number of deaths - 11, of which 10 were from a single failure of a gantry.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472061.htm [2] https://www.constructconnect.com/blog/construction-worker-de... [3] https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1987-05-21-2575677-story.h...
What's acceptable (i.e. It's ok if 1 person dies on this project) is different than what's the potential risk (i.e. There is a risk that 1 person might die on this project).
If you're working on a project and 5 people have died so far and you've still got a lot more to do I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that more people will die. So, if you're going to continue the project you're considering it acceptable that somebody else will die as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/30/us/nyc-construction-death...
That isn't to say you shouldn't make things safer but you have to take into account is your change a net positive over all. I have no idea what the trade off is for bridges. The bridge arguably increase commerce which means its completion created jobs. Poverty is a top killer of people so more jobs = less death.
That said, one thing I'm happy to see on construction sites, at least for buildings, they put up fences on every floor so it's harder to fall out. My guess is that really only became possible when they could create the fences out of plastic.
Although in fact remote work would be even better, for those jobs that support it.
Meanwhile jobs have become poverty traps, so they're not enough on their own to avoid poverty and death.
Ultimately it's not about building things or the cost of highly visible prestige projects. It's about systemic rather than fragmented thinking. Capitalism tends to the latter, because an airy wave of the invisible hand is supposed to somehow optimise everything.
This is magical fantasy. If you want intelligent culture-wide systems you have to get your best people to design and build them. And they have to consider long-term systemic outcomes as much as short-term goals and projects.
This culture is very, very bad at that. But it's also unrealistically convinced it's very good at it.
This is hard to do in a world where people have fundamentally incompatible belief systems.