The eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was supposed to be the crowning glory of the bridge-builder’s art, gracefully echoing the rolling hills surrounding San Francisco Bay.
Yet as the project heads for a Labor Day opening after $6.4 billion and 15 years, the country’s most daringly iconic highway bridge stands as a poster child for those who think major infrastructure projects are wasteful.
— bloomberg.com
Previously: Bolts along Bay Bridge bike path fail
4 Comments
The attractiveness of the new East Span depends on the vantage point from which it is viewed or photographed. Yes, this is yet another major infrastructure project for which there have issues with cost, schedule, and quality control issues.
Opening day should be toll free. Little kids will remember when their parents drove them over the new span when they become adults, lamenting longingly from somewhere else that they were priced out of the Bay Area.
10 years late, $5 billion over budget, substandard earthquake-safety bolts and you're worried about aesthetics?
Miles, I don't know who you're addressing.
Sure, money / time / quality are of paramount importance, but if they are replacing an eyesore like the previous and still standing east span, it should be pleasing to look at. In the grand scheme of things, the design has to visually work with the 4 spans of the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge as well. I'm thinking Vitruvius. The reason for all the delays is largely because the technology is new and uncommon. Sections indicate that the way the cables are slung and then brought around underneath, almost as if a cradle, is a new design. It's difficult to explain, but the structural write-ups intuitively make sense. If they had designed it as a conventional suspension span or something akin to the Tampa Bay Sunshine Skyway Bridge, this probably would have moved along faster and cheaper. We need to look at which parties commissioned and agreed upon the bridge design. They had probably intended it to be a signature bridge, given where it is.
"This will be building a monument to stupidity," Lin said when a design panel overrode his objections and selected the self-anchored suspension span in 1998. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Bridge-troubles-began-with-design-4616774.php
I'm a San Franciscan who believes the project has been a slow-motion fiasco, with a disappointing much-ado-about-nothing outcome and, now, a rushed opening lacking the pedestrian walk that has become traditional (here, at least) for these events.
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