Minnesota bridge collapse, infrastructure demands, and the question of how do you pay for all those roads?

BRANDI JADE THOMAS / AP. Cars are strewn on the collapsed portion of the Interstate 35W bridge, which stretches between Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Twin Cities reminder: Care for what we have

... a pointed reminder about the need for vigilance in the inspection and maintenance of our own state's 3,000 bridges and another 4,000 watched over by cities and counties.

Engineering experts at Washington State University and the University of Washington have a short list of usual causes of major bridge failures. In the case of the Minnesota collapse, the scouring away of soil around underwater concrete piers might be the first place to look. The erosion of the soil can be hard to spot during inspections because loose soil settles when the river is calm, explains Marc Eberhard, a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering.

The erosion of bridge supports brought down a span 20 years ago on the New York Thruway. Another suspect is fatigue, from the stresses and strains on steel parts flexing with the loads they carry. Small cracks can be fatal.

Corrosion is another enemy, and the failure of a single pin in 1980 helped bring down an Interstate 95 bridge over the Mianus River in Connecticut. For Minnesota, think weather extremes and de-icing solvents.

The age of the Minneapolis bridge is a factor as well. Since its construction in 1967, bridges simply are not built that way anymore. They now incorporate redundant design features intended to back up and compensate for failures of individual support elements. Washington has only a handful of steel-truss bridges, but it has plenty of old spans that do not incorporate modern engineering lessons.

This is a time when public officials earn their keep by ensuring that public safety is being watched over and timely work is being done. No one in the Seattle area who heard of the Minnesota tragedy did not think of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and, secondarily, the warp and woof of a storm-tossed 520 floating bridge. Those replacement plans are where, exactly?

Professor Kenneth L. Carper, of the WSU School of Architecture and Construction Management, quotes an engineer who investigated the Connecticut bridge collapse: "Imagination and fear are among the best tools for preventing tragedy."
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From the Washington Post, also see "D.C. Area Bridges Need Pricey Repair Work," and "Collapse Spotlights Weaknesses in U.S. Infrastructure. From the latter article:

Diminishing tax revenue and surging costs have put a double squeeze on state transportation departments, transportation experts said. While federal gas tax rates have remained at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, construction costs have been increasing 20 percent a year in some areas. The price of steel, oil and concrete are all up, partly driven by demand for raw materials in China, where the government is busy laying out a national highway system of its own.

For drivers, it's an acceptable risk to have a bad accident or other road problem significantly impact their trip, so long as it isn't that often.

People's unwillingness to pay taxes in the face of ever-increasing cost demands for building roads--the $700 million "mixing bowl" in Springfield or the $2 billion+ plus Wilson Bridge--shows that the desire for a free lunch is strong.

This letter to the editor in the Richmond Times-Dispatch is from August 2006:

Politicians Squander Gasoline Taxes, Mark Johnson, Midlothian, Virginia:

The recent letter from Ray D. Pethtel is one of the most startling things I've read in some time. Pethtel, identified by you as a past transportation commissioner, laments the fact that "only 16 percent of the cost of gasoline today is a result of state and federal taxes."

Let's get this straight: Fully one-sixth of what I pay to gas up my beat-up pickup truck doesn't fund exploration for future oil or natural gas deposits and their development. It doesn't go toward research of alternative energy sources; it doesn't go to the greedy oil companies as profit; it's not used in any way to reduce our dependence on foreign sources for energy. It goes to state or federal coffers to be spent on, presumably, transportation.

Forty-eight cents of the $2.85 I paid for a gallon of gasoline today goes to the government -- and we still have transportation woes? This is not a revenue problem; this is a problem with government.

The last biennial budget passed by the General Assembly was for $74 billion, the one previous was for $62 billion. Somewhere in that $6-billion per-year increase is enough money to address any transportation issues. That's what voters were saying in the Mason-Dixon poll Pethtel tries to discount.

A. Barton Hinkle is an op-ed columnist for the RTD. He writes a fair bit about transportation. One of the things he clued me into awhile ago, and is mentioned in the column that I will be quoting from, "Road Rage: Keep These Points in Mind As Transpo Debate Proceeds," is that new construction of highways create a "mathematical dilemma" for state departments of transportation-highways:

Current budget growth accelerates future budget growth. That's because VDOT has to spend money on maintenance as well as construction. A dollar spent on construction this year creates demand for maintenance dollars in future years. The faster VDOT spends money on road-building now, the faster it will have to spend on maintenance later.

He also writes:

THE SITUATION is not unique to Virginia; 21st-Century Highways, a book by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy and the Heritage Foundation, cites a 1996 study commissioned by the Federal Highway Administration. It found similar diminishing returns on investment: "The federal highway program produced extremely high benefits in its early days, as new direct routes were created and the network became more complete, but . . . the value of these benefits declined as the interstate system neared completion."

Collapsed section of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The murky, swirling waters of the Mississippi river hampered the work of divers Thursday searching for up to 30 people still missing after a huge bridge collapsed late Wednesday, killing at least four.(AFP/Getty Images/Scott Olson)