Well it wasn’t me saying it, but now it is. Nothing has happened in over a year. A major thoroughfare over a major port. It should have been fast-tracked.
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I agree. I’m not sure why it took Congress nine months to approve funding. The Minneapolis bridge replacement was only about 13 months from collapse to the new bridge opening.
I am saying that I am not all that in favor of the things DC calls infrastructure.
EX
- We need a bridge. biden shoves gthough a multi-billion dollar bill for windmills and solar panesl so his donors can make some money.
- We need a bridge, sixteen months later the government is almost ready to get ready to prepare to stand by to send in trucks thus week maybe.
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I’m with you on that. Fix the damn roads and bridges rather than trying to re-engineer society with “infrastructure” initiatives that change the course of society.
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I don’t disagree. What’s the solution? Government is notoriously slow (in this case, but not in Minneapolis) and inefficient, but who else can take on a project like this?
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Agreed.
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Well the Japanese government is not notoriously slow about these things. We could study what they do and try to imitate it.
Our government was not notoriously slow in decades past. We could study all the (ahem) “imprivments” we’ve made and undo those “improvments.”
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The reason you can’t see much of it is because most of it was replacement of aged-out structures like bridges and interchanges and repair of under maintained facilities. Very little was spent on anything that didn’t already exist to some degree. As of this May, there is still an estimated $105 billion in deferred maintenance on the nation’s roads and bridges. And the amount on railroads, airports and electrical grids is probably more than that. Fixing stuff before it completely wears out and falls down is not a waste of money.
And $1 trillion is probably much less than what it would take to restore everything out there that is on the verge of failure back to new condition.
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That is fast tracking. The decision early on to replace the bridge with an all-new design instead of just rebuilding what had fallen not only demanded a lot more money (thus the Congressional appropriation last December) but considerably more design engineering. All of that takes time. If this was a proposed new bridge where none had existed before, it would probably take ten years or more before construction began.
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In Minneapolis, they didn’t change the basic bridge configuration, and it required only $34 million from Congress to get the replacement project started. The Baltimore bridge requires a new design from end to end even for the part that was not destroyed in the accident which took months to engineer and develop cost estimates and it needed $100 million (of the estimated $1.7 to $1.9 billion cost) from Congress just to get started. The magnitude of this incident should not be underestimated.
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We put a man on the moon in under seven years.
That also had to be redesigned from the start.
I do not disagree with the time frame you have stated, I am saing that time frame is necessitated by a bunch of crap we should be getting rid of.
You want more/better infrastucture? More funding is not the path. fixing the process you seem to ahve accepted is the ONLY way. There will NEVER be enough money to provide for infrastructure needs via the current process.
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Tacoma Narrows Bridge Replacement (Tacoma, WA, 1940) Timeline: The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed on November 7, 1940,
Planning for its replacement began almost immediately, with design work starting in early 1941. Construction began in April 1941, and the new bridge opened on October 14, 1941. Total time from planning to completion: approximately 9 months. -
Tappan Zee Bridge Emergency Replacement (Tarrytown, NY, 1955) Timeline: Planning began in early 1955 after structural concerns emerged with the original Tappan Zee Bridge’s design and construction needs were prioritized. Design was finalized by mid-1955, construction started in March 1955, and the bridge opened on December 15, 1955. Total time from planning to completion: approximately 1 year.
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Of course with today’s computers things are faster.
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It’s more about giving desk jockeys jobs then putting blue collar workers working.
Take 520 bridge out here…a bridge to replace older bridge. 5.7 billion dollars. 1 billion of that was just for studies and environmental impact. That was before any concrete was poured.
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Take Sound transit rail system out here. I think original estimate was something like 36 billion, then voters approved 54 billion dollars in 2016. Cost to date…142 billion dollars.
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There is no comparison between the moon program and any civil works project. That was the number one national priority with essentially unlimited resources behind it. This is an unanticipated major project competing with hundreds of high priority projects across country that have been on the books for years. Even just getting the elected officials and agency bureaucrats to agree to decide what they should do was a monumental task. And I think you have absolutely no idea what just the engineering alone involved. Money to rebuild was the easy part.
So what “unnecessary crap” do you think should be cut from the process that would have speeded this up?
Neither of those projects compare to the magnitude or complexity of this project. And even obtaining the steel for those bridges today would take more than a year. We don’t make that kind of stuff here anymore. Even cement is imported.
And of course, the only permits needed back then were akin to building permits for the bureaucracy. Today, environmental studies and permitting can be the most time-consuming part of the effort.
Nerds and corrupt masters need to get paid first.
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In Lowell, MA, the Army Corps of Engineers put up a temporary bridge over the Merrimack River in 1983 to ease transportation problems. It was meant to be temporary. (Expected to last 4-5 years.)
It is still a major transportation route in the city today.
Initially, the new bridge was supposed to cost 40 million. Then it ballooned to 80. Then 100. Then 200.
They have spent the last 10 years doing studies and environmental impact analyses.
It looks like they have finally awarded a contract for 275 million. And it’s not even to a United States company.
Government. Go figger.
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You asked what could get cut out. 
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