How the I-95 Bridge Reopened Just 12 Days After Fiery Collapse | Hacker News Reader

How the I-95 Bridge Reopened Just 12 Days After Fiery Collapse

bloomberg.com

14 pointsmfiguiere13 comments

The quick re-opening is a hack, but it's a "pattern" that is well known and practiced in roadway construction. The middle 1/3 of the span is passing traffic on an improvised roadway while the bridge is "properly rebuilt" from the outside in. When the outer 2/3 are done then traffic will be pushed to those portions while the hack is removed and then rebuilt properly. THAT whole process is supposed to take 18 to 24 months from what I've seen elsewhere.

A good video about this by a guy who is really into roads and road engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ249N1aW_8

https://archive.is/PIywg

... contrast that to the experience in small cities and rural areas where repair of a small bridge seems to take six months or more. Witness that and you start to wonder if the George Washington Bridge was made by aliens or if maybe we just can't afford to have bridges. (Usually there are years of waiting for the repairs because the local government can't afford to make the repairs unless they get state or federal funding.)

Speeding up repair of small bridges might go a long way to raising perceptions of government legitimacy.

If ignoring cost, closing a road for likely months, papering over potential design issues for a temporary solution is not an issue, then go ahead and do this every where. Speeding up repairs would be lovely, trying to make municipalities not spend 50% of the budget to prevent wasting pennies and then giving the construction contract to connected entities on the other hand...

I know a lot of blue collar people in NY whose work is directly involved or adjacent to road construction and all of them express cynical views about corruption in that sphere.

Petty corruption is the open secret in all of American construction. Even out in the boonies where we never had the militant unions and "Machines" of new york, the construction company is owned by a guy who is high school friends with most of the people on the town council. Is it any wonder the contract goes to them?

Just blatant nepotism everywhere.

A car centric culture in which it is expected that everyone drive somewhere to accomplish just about anything is very expensive to maintain. Couple this with a belief that government can’t work and a belief that taxes must always be lowered and we have the current state of affairs. Something has to give eventually.

There's a bridge (iron truss) near the house I grew up on that has been out of commission since flooding from Lee in 2011 eroded the foundations enough to warrant closure.

Similar to this one, which was closed in 2006, and scheduled to be replaced in 2020 - https://lebtown.com/2019/07/26/historic-inwood-bridge-off-th...

I think you're right, it might. But someone has to raise the taxes to pay the expenses, whether it's quick as in the case of this hack ("make a few lanes usable quickly") or slow as usually the case. Local government has to either get the money from taxpayers, or from someone else, or not spend the money.

This is a real problem for organisations that received a subsidy to build something but none for the maintenance or repair. Organisations including local government. If they take the initial subsidy they're on the hook later, one way or another.

EDIT: Isn't this really a form of how rulers gain credibility by largesse? Roman emperors would build temples, churches etc. to gain credibility with the people. Infrastructure is nothing if not expensive, so isn't rebuilding car bridges really just a case of that?

Julius Cæsar killed a third of the Gauls and gained great popularity with Romans by using the spoils. Asking a wider branch of government to tax other people in other areas to pay the expenses the local government has assumed responsibility for is much less violent. Very much less violent.

There are numerous sources of legitimacy. Perceived competence is one of them, it is popular in Communist China, but rejected here because it depends on things the elite think are out of their control.

There is an appeal to tradition (we follow the same hollow rituals that our ancestors did, see the last few scenes in The Parallax View to see that mocked or the Schoolhouse Rock version of “How a bill becomes a law” for something more earnest8 or a constitution (Not that great because nobody who’s been alive for the last century has given consent.). The right in the U.S. used to think it owned the constitution but it seems to have given up on that and these pillars of legitimacy now belong mainly to the Democrats.

The right now seeks legitimacy through “we take a really extreme position and stick to our guns.”

I would mention the I-87 etc. bridge over the Tappan Zee stretch of the Hudson, built 2013-2017 to replace an older bridge, also the Nice bridge on US-301 over the Potomac, rebuilt 2020-2022. No, these weren't local government jobs.

Three years left for the George Washington Bridge suspension cables replacement project. Considering the magnitude of the project this is actually pretty reasonable.

https://www.nj.com/news/2021/04/can-this-massive-rebuild-get...

Road and bridge repair backlogs are being reduced from increased funding in the previous infrastructure act. This may only impact interstates and maybe state roads. I'm not sure if county and local stuff is part of that.

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