This is actually part of the PROBLEM - with so many bridges on the "worst possible category" it becomes a bridge who cried wolf scenario. There is no way to highlight "yeah this one is going to fall down tomorrow" if the worst you can do is mark it "this bridge bad like 42k others".
You need some form of a "stop ship" where inspectors get some number of "no way, close this entirely" that they can use without repercussions or something.
I think this leans on a thing that I think of as the "law of average quality." The belief that there's some mark, near the middle, and things below that mark are bad, and things above that mark are good. It's something that is only true if you're comparing things against themselves. If there are any external goals for the things being discussed, almost everything can be bad (and correspondingly, almost everything can be good.)
I feel like this thought process leads to the "worst possible category" containing 42k bridges. The construction of the categories was based around whether the bridge is safe, and this category says "the bridge is not safe." It's when you put it off long enough, and let the infrastructure deteriorate long enough, that you start going "which is the most unsafe though?" Or, "is a safety factor even necessary? They are by definition a >1.0 factor applied to what we think is safe." Then, "one in a hundred year events" or "once in a decade events." Eventually it's "hasn't collapsed yet!"
The fact that the list got that big means our problem isn't prioritization, our problem is failing to repair bridges. Commit to and budget for repairing 42k bridges, then prioritize where you start.
They sort of do have that power. They have the ability to lower the max vehicle weight and eventually it gets lowered to where no real traffic can go over it. Grady talked about it in the video.
There is a catch-22 for such a judgement call. As bridges generally weigh far more than the traffic they carry, there isn't much room between a bridge that is too dangerous for traffic and one that is too dangerous for anything, including repair work.
There's a road near me that's been replaced by a large 4 lane state route. There's almost no reason to drive it as there are no houses or farm access. The bridge is being completely replaced. The road is closed during construction, and I think the only people impacted by it are the recreational bikers. A boondoggle while other bridges around the country are in dangerous disrepair. I wish we knew there was a sensible prioritization that was published for review by we the taxpayers.
Those states also have some of the fewest bridges, with the exception of Texas, which has the most of all states, and double the second place state (Ohio). That said, Ohio is 41 times smaller…
So many ways to dice this information and I don’t even live in the US.
Texas is about 6 times bigger than Ohio. Texas is approximately 678,052 sq km, while Ohio is approximately 106,056 sq km.
The population of Texas is around 25.1 million people compared to 11.5 million in Ohio, a difference of 13.6 million people. That means about 2 times population wise.
I don't know by which size metric it is that ohio is 41 times smaller than texas?
I'm not sure about anyone else, but I'm pretty sure our bridges should be something considered important enough to keep maintained. :(
> 36 percent of all U.S. bridges (over 222,000 spans) require major repair work or replacement. Placed end‐to‐end, these structures span over 6,100 miles – and would take over 110 hours to cross at an average speed of 55‐miles‐per‐hour.
The Washington, D.C.-based American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) is a non-partisan federation whose primary goal is to aggressively grow and protect transportation infrastructure investment
After reading the measument rules, it is… complicated. From what I can gather, it seem that if any of the components (deck, culverts, sub/superstructure, waterways, etc) receive a ‘poor’ rating, the whole structure is marked as structurally deficient. It also factors in things like the current and expected traffic patterns and mainability.
So the industry's rating system maps this bridge - totally fucked, key structural members rusted away entirely, others with large, clearly visible holes right through important points, weakened to the point it ended up falling down - to "structurally deficient" and then maps "structurally deficient" to "not necessarily unsafe" ?
Kinda makes me think George Carlin was on to something with his hate of soft, euphemistic language.
Managing structurally deficient bridges is more problematic in places with winter or at least more varied weather (like Pennsylvania).
Just like this bridge, the big problem is that something happens and degradation switches from "slow but manageable" to "Oh, shit, suddenly that beam is gone and this bridge might collapse".
Same stuff for the Genoa, Italy bridge (Ponte Morandi). Everyone running on that would feel vibrations and "repairs" were just lipstick on a ugly face, until it finally collapsed, with 43 dead.
Surprisingly, or not so, no one was found guilty, not even the inspectors that didn't report the ongoing damages, just because "it would be too costly to rebuild it, and profits of the highway company (1) in charge of it would be zero".
(1) the company name is Atlantia, fully owned at the time by the Benetton family, yes those of the sweater chain
As the video states this was flagged by inspections 14 times over 7 years or so.
There's even inspection reports of one of the cross supports rusted through and disconnected, a cable taking some of the strain. At the very least the bridge should have just been closed, as unsafe.
I'm asking because I've been in standstil traffic (in my car) on the Lisbon "golden gate" type bridge and that thing was freaking bouncing up and down from traffic on other lanes.
Interestingly, the 25 of April Bridge in Lisbon was made by the American Bridge Company, same as the Bay Bridge, but not the Golden Gate.
And yes, it's normal. That bridge is very well maintained (there's a whole team there working daily, afaik, and I've witnessed many interventions in the past).
But it's true that big structures are often designed to move as a way to deal with forces. It's much better than something firm that doesn't move until it snaps.
I'm not sure you can diagnose it much from feeling vibrations if running. As an aside I don't remember it being open to pedestrians - I used to drive it occasionally.
Many western countries in general do not care for routine maintenance of
infrastructure / buildings / water lines / busses.
Norway has to be among the worst.
It is not fun and glorious for a political administration to set aside
$$$$ every year that will just go to people doing boring work that the
voters will not be impressed with.
You dont see politicians "Under my administration we painted XX buildings, we did need maintenance of YY bridges, we replaced ZZ parts of the railway that would become problematic with time.
Rather:
"Under my administration we opened up a new large hospital (because the other had near 0 maintannce for decades), we built 2 new bridges etc"
> You dont see politicians "Under my administration we painted XX buildings...
That's just bad politicking then.
"Under my administration we hired hundreds of workers in Anytown who can proudly say they worked to maintain this city's infrastructure and provide a future for not only their kids but all of our kids. Their paychecks put food on the table and money into the local economy."
"If you don't want to pay taxes then who's gonna pay for the roads?"
Apparently, nobody pays for it either way. It's astounding to me how little tax money goes into paying for infrastructure.
In 2023 the US federal government spent $44.8 billion on infrastructure and transferred $81.5 billion to the states. That's $126.3 billion out of a $6.1 trillion budget. ('Only' $4.4 trillion in revenue though.)
Most infrastructure is paid for by states and cities, not via federal transfers. Your quote is actively deceptive, you literally cut out the second part of the same source here[1]:
> The federal government spent $44.8 billion on infrastructure in 2023 and transferred an additional $81.5 billion to states. In 2021, state and local governments spent $218.5 billion on transportation and infrastructure, excluding federal government transfers.
The vast majority of the budget is just transfers from one person to another. (Social security, welfare, medicaid, etc.) Doesn’t make much more sense to compare this to infrastructure spending than it makes to compare the cost of maintenance on the bank building to the total value of the payments it processes.
Having localities pay from local tax money seems like it would focus money on expenditures that the people that use them and pay for them will approve of with their own skin in the game. There are some interstate highways that serve multiple localities, but these should be the minority, right?
Bridge repair is further complicated by the United States’ form of government. The majority of the major bridges in poor condition in California (and most other states, I presume) were built with Federal highway funds which started drying up in the 1970s, leaving a huge hole in the finances for maintenance.
Since most income and business taxes go to the Federal government, states are dependent on Federal grants for a lot of infrastructure.
That strange to hear. Why do you have this feeling? After visiting Porto and Italy around and below Napoli, I cannot imagine that there are any place in Nordic countries which has even just similar tolerance to not maintain something. But I don’t know too much about Norway specifically.
Infrastructure maintenance was quite a big issue during the 2015 US election. I'm not sure the Trump administration actually did anything about it – I don't really follow US politics that closely. My point is: people do care.
I think the bigger problem is maintenance is just one cost out of many. There's also education, and health care, and social services, and police, and firemen, and pensions, and all sorts of other things, and that's also important. It's relatively easy to "save" on maintenance because nothing is going to fall down immediately and no one will really notice – at least not for a while. In the long run you're not really saving anything of course.
It's easy to critique this from the sidelines, but the pressures politicians and governments are under make it pretty tricky to do anything else. Saving money in other areas is going to be unpopular. Raising taxes even more so. A lot of times stuff like this is a Kobayashi Maru.
If you knew all this, would you have avoided driving over the bridge? Would you have wanted the local government to close it indefinitely awaiting repairs?
Let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and you're in the danger area for 2 minutes, with a 20% chance of fatality (in fact, nobody died). That's still around a one in 4 million chance any given trip kills you, about the same as 30 miles of driving for the average American driver.
Most people would accept that level of risk. Perhaps not to save a couple of minutes on the journey, but if everyone was redirected to another route at rush hour, it might cost each commuter 10-20 minutes.
A handful of newsworthy bridge collapses per decade across the US doesn't seem so bad. Instead of negligence, perhaps that indicates an appropriate level of maintenance and risk tolerance, and an appropriate human price to add to the 500,000 other road deaths over the same period.
A well-maintained (and well designed, but there's no reason to think the design was at fault here) bridge shouldn't collapse. Ever. "Appropriate maintenance" in this case would have been to periodically unclog the drains so the water can run off in a controlled fashion and not pool and corrode the supports. How expensive can that be? Instead, the bridge collapses (and they were lucky that no one was killed in the collapse), and they have to replace it for millions of dollars. Money saved on maintenance is the very definition of the proverb "penny wise, pound foolish" IMHO.
I don’t know how things work in other countries, but in the US new construction is almost always funded with a big chunk of federal dollars (deficit spending), but maintenance has to be done out of your own state or local budget. The incentives are all fucked up.
Ah, but replacement comes out of the capital budget not the operating budget, and involves ribbon cuttings and speechifying on opening day as opposed to inconvenient lane closures or even hidden ongoing tasks that are invisible to the voter.
I believe regardless of the actual probability of failure, most people would have refused to drive across the bridge had they seen one of the supports had become completely detached. Another way to put it is if authorities had closed the bridge in 2019, I believe most people wouldn't complain when they were presented the photo of the detached support.
Also I don't think it's possible for your risk calculation to be done preemptively. We don't know the final breaking point of a piece of steel until we break it. All the calculations and modelling of the bridge will have been done with error margins and because of that we don't have any choice but to over-engineer things so we always stay outside of the worse-case margin for error. Given all that, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the risk of a bridge collapse to be a lot lower than the average risk we take on the road.
> That's still around a one in 4 million chance any given trip kills you, about the same as 30 miles of driving for the average American driver.
For those wondering if that is right, it is. Here's the math.
Americans drive about 3.2 trillion miles per year and about 40 000 people are killed. That's one death per 80 000 000 miles.
Assuming each mile is equally deadly, that chances you survive a given a mile would be 79 999 999 / 80 000 000. To survive a trip of N miles, you have to survive each individual mile sequentially. The chances of that would be (79 999 999 / 80 000 000)^N.
The chance of not surviving that trip would then be 1 - (79 999 999 / 80 000 000)^N.
For N = 30 that is 1 / 2 666 667, which is close enough to dmurray's number to count as a match. There's enough fuzziness is in the inputs that all we can hope for is the same ballpark.
I've seen others say the rate is one death per 120 000 000 miles, and for N = 30 that does give 1 / 4 000 000, so I'd guess they are using that rate.
> Most people would accept that level of risk. Perhaps not to save a couple of minutes on the journey, but if everyone was redirected to another route at rush hour, it might cost each commuter 10-20 minutes
One big difference is that with the bridge everyone has the average risk. I cross the bridge, I'm rolling a d4000000 and hoping I don't get a 1.
With a car I can take steps to make the chances of dying on my particular trip much lower than average. With the car I can often time my trip so as to go at times of day or during weather conditions or during traffic conditions when accident rates are lower.
> Let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and you're in the danger area for 2 minutes, with a 20% chance of fatality
Or how about let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and a school bus with twenty kids in it drives over the bridge twice a day, with each child facing a 20% chance of fatality.
‘I probably won’t be the one who dies when it collapses’ is a terrible metric for whether or not we should try to mitigate the risk of a bridge collapse.
It's likely that you live in an area with similar mortality risk from air pollution. Is there a reason not to move to an area with lower risk from air pollution?
Something I think you're missing here is that when the bridge collapses, cars can no longer drive across it until a new bridge is built, so the inconvenience is almost certainly much worse than if they'd just closed it for maintenance for a bit in the first place.
Also, it probably would have been a lot cheaper to have someone roto-rooter all the drains of all the bridges in Pittsburg once a year than to clean up one collapsed bridge and rebuild it on short notice. I suspect they have other bridges with similar water damage and have to pay to fix those too.
I am fairly certain that a large majority of people, if they'd have had access to those images of the bridges structural members, would have stopped using it.
Most people are unable to accurately diagnose a bridge structure other than "yeah looks rusty". And if that were the case, they wouldn't be driving much of anywhere in that part of the country, which is called the "rust belt" for a reason. Pittsburgh has a very high number of bridges, if you go anywhere in that city and you don't want to cross a rusty bridge, you can't go very far.
The average American driver includes drunk and tired drivers who play on their phone while speeding. The numbers for sober people driving reasonably e.g. on their commute are probably better.
Yeah it's exactly this mentality that resulted in the Ford Pinto scandal of the 70s.
How does that 1:4M probability change when you commute over the bridge twice a day? Humans are notorious for being bad gauging risk, and we very often make the mistake that past success means lower risk of future failure, which for a deteriorating bridge is exactly the opposite of what's going to happen.
In my opinion bridges shouldn't collapse, like ever. Annual inspections for years prior pointed to a severely deteriorating structure, even after the temporary cable stays were put in place. The tweet with a picture of a completely detached member a couple of years before the collapse makes this even more egregious.
This is a textbook example of where bureaucracy prevails over common sense. Heads should roll. Thankfully nobody died, but the lack of maintenance and upkeep resulted in a total failure, wasting lots of taxpayer money to replace.
The Pinto thing was dramatically overblown. And seriously set back the acceptance of small cars in the US. For a supposed environmentalist and consumer advocate, Ralph Nadar did FAR more harm than good by grifting off a bunch of sensationalist poppycock. That he's still looked upon as some sort of folk hero is beyond disgusting and just shows how gullible people continue to be paying attention only to the sensationalistic superficial propaganda and not looking deeper.
Predictions and pre vs post accident is an interesting subject.
Which bridge that is currently in operation should be closed next?
(Not a dunk on the article, which brilliantly addresses the difficulty of knowing in advance vs making real world changes. Practical Engineering is an awesome YouTube channel!)
> Which bridge that is currently in operation should be closed next?
The article/video actually touches on this:
> The City of Pittsburgh quadrupled their spending on inspection, maintenance, and repairs. And they redid the load ratings on all the bridges they owned, resulting in one bridge being closed until it can be rehabilitated and two more having lane restrictions imposed.
It really is supremely fortunate that the collapse took place in the early morning when few people were about. I've walked under that bridge many times, it's a lovely recreational footpath through the heart of Frick Park, and more than once I've clambered up the hillside under the bridge for fun.
An interesting takeaway is that a simple task like cleaning the drainage grates and preventing them from being clogged probably would have saved the bridge. The bridge has a prescribed drainage path, and with the grates clogged the water drains and pools in other places, accelerating the corrosion.
Readit News
16 of the worst are in LA county and several see 300k trips daily, including one carrying the 405.[1]
0. PDF https://artbabridgereport.org/reports/2023-ARTBA-Bridge-Repo...
1. https://artbabridgereport.org/state/ranking/top-bridges
EDIT: States with the least % of SD bridges: AZ, NV, TX, DE, and UT.
WV and IA have the most at almost 20% SD bridges respectively. (1 in 5!)
EDIT2: Raw data https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/ascii.cfm
You need some form of a "stop ship" where inspectors get some number of "no way, close this entirely" that they can use without repercussions or something.
I feel like this thought process leads to the "worst possible category" containing 42k bridges. The construction of the categories was based around whether the bridge is safe, and this category says "the bridge is not safe." It's when you put it off long enough, and let the infrastructure deteriorate long enough, that you start going "which is the most unsafe though?" Or, "is a safety factor even necessary? They are by definition a >1.0 factor applied to what we think is safe." Then, "one in a hundred year events" or "once in a decade events." Eventually it's "hasn't collapsed yet!"
The fact that the list got that big means our problem isn't prioritization, our problem is failing to repair bridges. Commit to and budget for repairing 42k bridges, then prioritize where you start.
And it can be done in a way that there isn't a bus on the bridge when it collapses.
So many ways to dice this information and I don’t even live in the US.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/190386/number-of-road-br...
The population of Texas is around 25.1 million people compared to 11.5 million in Ohio, a difference of 13.6 million people. That means about 2 times population wise.
I don't know by which size metric it is that ohio is 41 times smaller than texas?
?
I'm not sure about anyone else, but I'm pretty sure our bridges should be something considered important enough to keep maintained. :(
> 36 percent of all U.S. bridges (over 222,000 spans) require major repair work or replacement. Placed end‐to‐end, these structures span over 6,100 miles – and would take over 110 hours to cross at an average speed of 55‐miles‐per‐hour.
That's a lot of bridge.
About ARTBA
The Washington, D.C.-based American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) is a non-partisan federation whose primary goal is to aggressively grow and protect transportation infrastructure investment
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/18/2017-00...
Kinda makes me think George Carlin was on to something with his hate of soft, euphemistic language.
They finally passed an infrastructure bill which hopefully includes fixing 'em.
I know they've been replacing a lot on I-80 in IA.
Just like this bridge, the big problem is that something happens and degradation switches from "slow but manageable" to "Oh, shit, suddenly that beam is gone and this bridge might collapse".
While our state representatives are issuing a tax refund because we are "running a surplus"
This state is wild. I bet it will be the first to be merged with a nearby state because of poor governance.
Surprisingly, or not so, no one was found guilty, not even the inspectors that didn't report the ongoing damages, just because "it would be too costly to rebuild it, and profits of the highway company (1) in charge of it would be zero".
(1) the company name is Atlantia, fully owned at the time by the Benetton family, yes those of the sweater chain
There's even inspection reports of one of the cross supports rusted through and disconnected, a cable taking some of the strain. At the very least the bridge should have just been closed, as unsafe.
And the article starts by stating that the collapse was ‘without warning.’
I'm asking because I've been in standstil traffic (in my car) on the Lisbon "golden gate" type bridge and that thing was freaking bouncing up and down from traffic on other lanes.
And yes, it's normal. That bridge is very well maintained (there's a whole team there working daily, afaik, and I've witnessed many interventions in the past).
But it's true that big structures are often designed to move as a way to deal with forces. It's much better than something firm that doesn't move until it snaps.
Deleted Comment
More to the point a proper study a year before the collapse with endoscopes showed the cables were pretty rusted and dangerous https://www.lastampa.it/esteri/la-stampa-in-english/2018/08/...
The company managing it had tendered to get repairs done but they hadn't started by the time of the collapse.
Norway has to be among the worst.
It is not fun and glorious for a political administration to set aside $$$$ every year that will just go to people doing boring work that the voters will not be impressed with.
You dont see politicians "Under my administration we painted XX buildings, we did need maintenance of YY bridges, we replaced ZZ parts of the railway that would become problematic with time.
Rather: "Under my administration we opened up a new large hospital (because the other had near 0 maintannce for decades), we built 2 new bridges etc"
That's just bad politicking then.
"Under my administration we hired hundreds of workers in Anytown who can proudly say they worked to maintain this city's infrastructure and provide a future for not only their kids but all of our kids. Their paychecks put food on the table and money into the local economy."
Apparently, nobody pays for it either way. It's astounding to me how little tax money goes into paying for infrastructure.
In 2023 the US federal government spent $44.8 billion on infrastructure and transferred $81.5 billion to the states. That's $126.3 billion out of a $6.1 trillion budget. ('Only' $4.4 trillion in revenue though.)
That's 2% of the budget.
> The federal government spent $44.8 billion on infrastructure in 2023 and transferred an additional $81.5 billion to states. In 2021, state and local governments spent $218.5 billion on transportation and infrastructure, excluding federal government transfers.
[1] https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/transportation-infra...
Having localities pay from local tax money seems like it would focus money on expenditures that the people that use them and pay for them will approve of with their own skin in the game. There are some interstate highways that serve multiple localities, but these should be the minority, right?
We should cover all our internal needs before we show our largesse elsewhere.
Since most income and business taxes go to the Federal government, states are dependent on Federal grants for a lot of infrastructure.
That strange to hear. Why do you have this feeling? After visiting Porto and Italy around and below Napoli, I cannot imagine that there are any place in Nordic countries which has even just similar tolerance to not maintain something. But I don’t know too much about Norway specifically.
I think the bigger problem is maintenance is just one cost out of many. There's also education, and health care, and social services, and police, and firemen, and pensions, and all sorts of other things, and that's also important. It's relatively easy to "save" on maintenance because nothing is going to fall down immediately and no one will really notice – at least not for a while. In the long run you're not really saving anything of course.
It's easy to critique this from the sidelines, but the pressures politicians and governments are under make it pretty tricky to do anything else. Saving money in other areas is going to be unpopular. Raising taxes even more so. A lot of times stuff like this is a Kobayashi Maru.
Let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and you're in the danger area for 2 minutes, with a 20% chance of fatality (in fact, nobody died). That's still around a one in 4 million chance any given trip kills you, about the same as 30 miles of driving for the average American driver.
Most people would accept that level of risk. Perhaps not to save a couple of minutes on the journey, but if everyone was redirected to another route at rush hour, it might cost each commuter 10-20 minutes.
A handful of newsworthy bridge collapses per decade across the US doesn't seem so bad. Instead of negligence, perhaps that indicates an appropriate level of maintenance and risk tolerance, and an appropriate human price to add to the 500,000 other road deaths over the same period.
Also I don't think it's possible for your risk calculation to be done preemptively. We don't know the final breaking point of a piece of steel until we break it. All the calculations and modelling of the bridge will have been done with error margins and because of that we don't have any choice but to over-engineer things so we always stay outside of the worse-case margin for error. Given all that, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the risk of a bridge collapse to be a lot lower than the average risk we take on the road.
For those wondering if that is right, it is. Here's the math.
Americans drive about 3.2 trillion miles per year and about 40 000 people are killed. That's one death per 80 000 000 miles.
Assuming each mile is equally deadly, that chances you survive a given a mile would be 79 999 999 / 80 000 000. To survive a trip of N miles, you have to survive each individual mile sequentially. The chances of that would be (79 999 999 / 80 000 000)^N.
The chance of not surviving that trip would then be 1 - (79 999 999 / 80 000 000)^N.
For N = 30 that is 1 / 2 666 667, which is close enough to dmurray's number to count as a match. There's enough fuzziness is in the inputs that all we can hope for is the same ballpark.
I've seen others say the rate is one death per 120 000 000 miles, and for N = 30 that does give 1 / 4 000 000, so I'd guess they are using that rate.
> Most people would accept that level of risk. Perhaps not to save a couple of minutes on the journey, but if everyone was redirected to another route at rush hour, it might cost each commuter 10-20 minutes
One big difference is that with the bridge everyone has the average risk. I cross the bridge, I'm rolling a d4000000 and hoping I don't get a 1.
With a car I can take steps to make the chances of dying on my particular trip much lower than average. With the car I can often time my trip so as to go at times of day or during weather conditions or during traffic conditions when accident rates are lower.
Or how about let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and a school bus with twenty kids in it drives over the bridge twice a day, with each child facing a 20% chance of fatality.
‘I probably won’t be the one who dies when it collapses’ is a terrible metric for whether or not we should try to mitigate the risk of a bridge collapse.
Bridges sometimes fail catastrophically, with risk to life. Modeling risk is a necessary way to consider the costs of mitigation.
Leaving aside the poor helpless babies, what metric would you suggest?
I wouldn't and I definitely wouldn't if I had other people in the car.
I am fairly certain that a large majority of people, if they'd have had access to those images of the bridges structural members, would have stopped using it.
How does that 1:4M probability change when you commute over the bridge twice a day? Humans are notorious for being bad gauging risk, and we very often make the mistake that past success means lower risk of future failure, which for a deteriorating bridge is exactly the opposite of what's going to happen.
In my opinion bridges shouldn't collapse, like ever. Annual inspections for years prior pointed to a severely deteriorating structure, even after the temporary cable stays were put in place. The tweet with a picture of a completely detached member a couple of years before the collapse makes this even more egregious.
This is a textbook example of where bureaucracy prevails over common sense. Heads should roll. Thankfully nobody died, but the lack of maintenance and upkeep resulted in a total failure, wasting lots of taxpayer money to replace.
You can get a good sense of this from the equivalence listed immediately after the odds:
>> That's still around a one in 4 million chance any given trip kills you, about the same as 30 miles of driving
So it'd be closely analogous to driving a 30-mile commute twice a day. How much risk do you feel that involves?
Seems possible. Airline booking sites already offer filters to exclude 737 Max planes.
> That's still around a one in 4 million chance any given trip kills you
That's a one in five chance that any given trip kills you, unless 20% means something very different to you than it does to me.
Collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania January 28, 2022
Highway Investigation Report HIR-24-02 released: February 21, 2024
PDF (136 pages): https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
Which bridge that is currently in operation should be closed next?
(Not a dunk on the article, which brilliantly addresses the difficulty of knowing in advance vs making real world changes. Practical Engineering is an awesome YouTube channel!)
The article/video actually touches on this:
> The City of Pittsburgh quadrupled their spending on inspection, maintenance, and repairs. And they redid the load ratings on all the bridges they owned, resulting in one bridge being closed until it can be rehabilitated and two more having lane restrictions imposed.
I don't know which one bridge it is, though.