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Commenters in this thread are making a lot of generalizations about tax structures and so on, but it important to keep in mind this is a special case at a numbe

Commenters in this thread are making a lot of generalizations about tax structures and so on, but it important to keep in mind this is a special case at a number of levels. Pittsburgh has an unusually large number of bridges. These bridges were built during times of relative wealth when the local steel and related industries were doing well. Since the decline of American industry Pittsburgh has scaled way back and had to rebuild itself as a medical and technology center. This recovery is mostly a success story, but the infrastructure cannot be maintained. For example, the greater Pittsburgh area has some of the first suburban areas to be completely abandoned with services withdrawn, Penn Hills being a poignant example of this. Obviously no bridges should be coming down, but there is a real problem here of how to build and maintain a modern city that is smaller than the older one that it replaces.

jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
What a tragic white elephant of a gift.
XnoiVeX 5y ago
[flagged]
- hokumguru 5y ago
  Not saying I disagree necessarily but fwiw the weather in Texas is quite easier on infrastructure than in PA. Texas also hasn't seen the industry woes that other states have in the past century. And just because Texas has the most bridges of any state doesn't detract from the fact that Pittsburgh still has its own high number of bridges.
  - notacoward 5y ago
    I'd also wonder about the level of diligence applied to detecting and reporting such problems in Texas. How many of the bridges in Texas are really in better than poor condition?
  - nr2x 5y ago
    Pittsburgh weather in particular is harder on infrastructure than any other city I've lived in.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  The GP's comment was specific to Pittsburgh, what is the narrative that you believe would unfairly catch Texas in its net?
- lief79 5y ago
  The counting methods of "bridges" don't seem to match between the sites. Pennslyvania's average age of a bridge is over 50 years old, where Texas lists only half of their bridges being over 40 years old. https://www.penndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/pages/default.aspx https://www.penndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/pages/def... So Pennslyvania's clearly got a problem, but Pittsburg (and the state on the whole) gets more rain and far more snow and ice, so even if they were the same age, it doesn't really seem comparable.
- outside1234 5y ago
  Texas is also in a lot of places new build. They will face the same problems when oil for fuel is obsolete (probably within 15 years).
  - MandieD 5y ago
    Especially when oil for fuel is obsolete because an awful lot of my home state’s prosperity and thus tax revenue is still tied to the oil industry.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Most bridges in Texas are less than 40 years old and 38% are less than 20 years old. This bridge was 50 years old and many bridges in Pittsburg are similarly old. Coincidentally, bridges have a 50-75 year lifespan. It's probably on the lower end in areas with tons of cold weather, salt and ice. Texas has less deteriorating weather in general. Hence the whole "northern cars turn to rust buckets" meme. Also, this corresponds to Pittsburg's heyday being 50 years ago.
- dang 5y ago
  Could you please omit swipes from your comments here? You're making a good point and the swipe spoils it. On HN, we want curious conversation in which people are thoughtful and respectful toward each other. The idea is to collaborate in figuring out the truth together. I know it often seems like other people don't care about that, but a lot of this is an artifact of the medium, because internet comments lack the out-of-band signals that we normally rely on to evaluate other people's intentions. Also, it's easy to perceive (and/or imagine) bad faith in others, and easy to underestimate the equivalent in oneself by 10x or more. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20objects%20mirror%20closer&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - second--shift 5y ago
    Doing god's work DanG, thank you. Re-reading some of the guidelines myself; it's good to stay familiar to keep HN the way it is.
ineedasername 5y ago
The issue is not unique to Pittsburgh, even if the location has its own specific challenges. More than 30% of US bridges are in need of repair or preservation work, and on rating bridges in either "good" or "fair" condition, the total bridge population has fewer than 50% rated as "good". [0] About 7-8% are rated poor. [0] https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges/ https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges/
- mmazing 5y ago
  Do you happen to know if their dataset is available to the public?
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  The issue isn’t unique to Pittsburgh, but the scale is. At ~450 bridges, it has one of the highest amounts in the world, especially for its size. (I am from Pittsburgh originally and used to bike over this bridge quite often.)
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I couldn't find ratings specific to Pittsburgh to determine what proportion of them fit into the Good/Fair/Poor categories. That's what would really be needed to assess the scale of the problem for Pittsburgh relative to the rest of the country. Although knowing what I do about the area I wouldn't be surprised if it is disproportionately worse: It's only somewhat recently that it's made a bit of an economic comeback from its downtrodden rustbelt days. I just wanted to clarify that, as much as Pittsburgh may be particularly problematic, its infrastructure issues were still replicated across most of the US.
    - steveklabnik 5y ago
      So, I actually did look this up four days ago, but it seems that PennDOT changed their website? https://www.penndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/Pages/default.aspx https://www.penndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/Pages/def... Those excel spreadsheets don't seem to do anything when I click on them. The note I took was "There are 25,437 bridges in PA. 9.59% of them were rated in “poor” condition last month, with only 34.37% of them being “good”". The original sheet was broken out by county, with Allegheny County basically being the same as the city of Pittsburgh in this regard. > I just wanted to clarify that, as much as Pittsburgh may be particularly problematic, its infrastructure issues were still replicated across most of the US. Absolutely, it is an issue everywhere for sure.
voisin 5y ago
> These bridges were built during times of relative wealth when the local steel and related industries were doing well. This is a problem that needs to be solved everywhere. Governments build infrastructure with nothing but hope that future tax revenue will support maintenance. There should be something like a retirement plan for this infrastructure where a certain amount is invested at the time of construction to support maintenance ongoing.
- prirun 5y ago
  I agree this is a good idea, but history has shown that if there is a pile of money sitting somewhere, governments blow it, just like many states have blown through public retirement funds. The fundamental problem is that people running governments are spending other people's money and they never have a problem doing that.
  - voisin 5y ago
    Isn't this a problem that the pile of money isn't ring-fenced from the general coffers?
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    >The fundamental problem is that people running governments are spending other people's money and they never have a problem doing that. I would go further and state that voters are spending tomorrow's taxpayers' money and they never have a problem doing that. As a politician advocating for paying for things today, you are not going to win elections against someone who promises to push cash flow into the future and lower taxes today. Try replacing taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions (which can be pushed onto taxpayers decades in the future) with purchasing equivalent annuities from an insurance company today (which have to be properly accounted for and paid for today, requiring higher taxes today).
    - hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
      > I would go further and state that voters are spending tomorrow's taxpayers' money and they never have a problem doing that. This is what happens to retail politics when the population is trained to think for the short term. After all (successful) politicians merely follow trends.
opwieurposiu 5y ago
At the risk of seeming callous, I am not convinced it is obvious that bridges should never collapse. This is an unreachable goal that will just make bridges more expensive and create excessive regulation. No artifact of man is 100% reliable, the only rational goal is a certain number of "nines." The users of a system should decide how many nines they are willing to pay for. For me personally, A bridge with a 99.9% chance of not collapsing in a given year is good enough.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dijit 5y ago
  Nobody is advocating for object permanence. People advocate for understood constraints of critical infrastructure. Engineers usually have knowledge about longevity and reliability of components. There are examples of man-made systems which absolutely require 100% reliability, but those still have lifetimes and will be destroyed at some point to be replaced with something else[0]. A bridge can be destroyed, but it should not collapse without prior warning. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY-XHAoVEeU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY-XHAoVEeU
  - omnicognate 5y ago
    > Nobody is advocating for object permanence. I am. People need to understand that bridges continue to exist when they're not looking at them. (Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence)
    - mprovost 5y ago
  - opwieurposiu 5y ago
    Did you watch this video? Tom claims in the video that the barrier is designed for up to a thousand year tide. That's essentially the same as the three nines standard I advocated.
jefftk 5y ago
> Penn Hills being a poignant example of this Link? I'm interested in reading more, but quickly searching didn't turn up anything
- RC_ITR 5y ago
  I think GP is referring to this resort and not the still-functioning inner-ring suburb of Pittsburgh? https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/penn-hills-resort https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/penn-hills-resort Weird example, since it's in Eastern PA, despite sharing a name with that suburb.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    An abandoned resort doesn't sound like a city abandoning a suburban area and withdrawing services?
    - RC_ITR 5y ago
      Yeah but 40k people live in Penn Hills so… EDIT: Maybe it’s this [0], but lol Pittsburgh is not unique in having some abandoned homes. Literally every municipality ever in history has an area with abandoned homes. [0] https://archive.triblive.com/local/penn-hills/some-penn-hills-residents-frustrated-with-abandoned-homes/ https://archive.triblive.com/local/penn-hills/some-penn-hill...
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    It's been a while, but IIRC, Penn Hills (the one in Allegheny county) has seen reduced service from the Port Authority over the last 20 years, with many bus lines being outright discontinued/consolidated.
Maursault 5y ago
> there is a real problem here of how to build and maintain a modern city that is smaller than the older one that it replaces. I'm nearly certain Pittsburgh itself, the city, and its immediate surrounding boroughs has grown in population pretty steadily (though not significantly) since the steel boom even while the population of it's suburbs (and PA in general) have steadily lost population, though some areas around the city have grown, like near the airport, property values have skyrocketed to the point that I see a real estate bubble (cookie cutter single family houses built in the 1960's are going for $250K-$350K now, a lot to pay for a 60yo house in the burbs), which contrasts the other areas that have been completely gutted in population and deteriorated (like Ambridge, Aliquippa).
- samatman 5y ago
  Your near certainty is not justified by numbers which are publicly available and could have been consulted. The population of Pittsburgh proper is half what it was in 1950. Here's a convenient tabulation: http://population.city/united-states/pittsburgh/ http://population.city/united-states/pittsburgh/ You're equally wrong about the suburbs, which have grown as the city center shrank.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    > You're equally wrong about the suburbs, which have grown as the city center shrank. Nonsense. My mistake, but my math is at least good enough to know I was not equally wrong. That would be far too unlikely, but if so, some kind of bizarre coincidence.
- syki 5y ago
  The population of metro area Pittsburgh has declined in the last 20 years and is over 100,000 people less than it was in 1970 [1]. Pittsburgh’s population today is 10% less than it was in 2000 and is considerably smaller than it was at its peak [2]. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23100/pittsburgh/population https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23100/pittsburgh/populati... [2] https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/pittsburgh-pennsylvania https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/pittsburgh-pennsylvania
- 5y ago
throwaway894345 5y ago
> Obviously no bridges should be coming down, but there is a real problem here of how to build and maintain a modern city that is smaller than the older one that it replaces. If an area's population shrinks such that it doesn't need / can't afford all of its bridges, why not prioritize the critical bridges for maintenance and close the others as they become unsafe. Why is this always posed as a dichotomy between letting bridges fail and funding maintenance for each and every bridge?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- burlesona 5y ago
  The politics get nasty real fast. Nobody wants the bridge they regularly use to be shut down, regardless of whether the number of regular users is very small. In US politics, especially at the local level a fiercely-motivated vocal minority is very powerful (because hardly anyone else pays attention).
- double_nan 5y ago
  I'd say bad publicity. People are afraid of hard conversations and US politicians doesn't have any incentives to treat the voters are adults. Politicians treat ppl as children at best and cattle at worst. No one asks children what compromise to make: to buy bread or to buy milk if money are running low. This is the root cause of the problems from my point of view.
34679 5y ago
$250 million for public safety $59 million for public works 2021 Amended Operating Budget: https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/15962_2021_Amended_Operating_Budget_v2.pdf https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/15962_2021_Amen...
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
It's not just a "oh whoops the city shrank" problem, it's endemic to all American infrastructure. The problem is that local governments are permitted to de-prioritize public safety.
YeBanKo 5y ago
The media made it a show case for Biden's infrastructure plan, but it almost proves the opposite. It was first rated poor in 2011, from Pittsburgh Post Gazette [1]. The collapse came in the wake of troubling inspections dating to 2011 that show the aging span has been rated in poor condition, according to the National Bridge Inventory. Records from the inventory show that the bridge was consistently found to be in poor shape during inspections from 2011 to 2017, with estimated repairs at $1.5 million. Mr. Gainey said the bridge was last inspected in September 2021. A statewide report from last year noted the bridge was still in poor condition. The repair estimate was $1.5 mil in 2011. As someone posted in another comment, they spend 4 times more on public safety than on public works: $250 million vs $59 million. This seems like a failure of the city and state governments to prioritize. I know that Pittsburg has lots of bridges, but if they can't support it, then they should close some. This issue is neither unexpected, not a global or cataclysmic event. If the city needs constant maintenance help from the Federal government to maintain its infrastructure, then it simply can't afford it. [1] https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/01/28/pittsburgh-bridge-collapse-forbes-braddock-avenue-point-breeze-squirrel-hill/stories/202201280075 https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/01/28/pittsburg...

jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago

What a tragic white elephant of a gift.

XnoiVeX 5y ago

[flagged]

hokumguru 5y ago
Not saying I disagree necessarily but fwiw the weather in Texas is quite easier on infrastructure than in PA. Texas also hasn't seen the industry woes that other states have in the past century. And just because Texas has the most bridges of any state doesn't detract from the fact that Pittsburgh still has its own high number of bridges.
- notacoward 5y ago
  I'd also wonder about the level of diligence applied to detecting and reporting such problems in Texas. How many of the bridges in Texas are really in better than poor condition?
- nr2x 5y ago
  Pittsburgh weather in particular is harder on infrastructure than any other city I've lived in.
ineedasername 5y ago
The GP's comment was specific to Pittsburgh, what is the narrative that you believe would unfairly catch Texas in its net?
lief79 5y ago
The counting methods of "bridges" don't seem to match between the sites. Pennslyvania's average age of a bridge is over 50 years old, where Texas lists only half of their bridges being over 40 years old. https://www.penndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/pages/default.aspx https://www.penndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/pages/def... So Pennslyvania's clearly got a problem, but Pittsburg (and the state on the whole) gets more rain and far more snow and ice, so even if they were the same age, it doesn't really seem comparable.
outside1234 5y ago
Texas is also in a lot of places new build. They will face the same problems when oil for fuel is obsolete (probably within 15 years).
- MandieD 5y ago
  Especially when oil for fuel is obsolete because an awful lot of my home state’s prosperity and thus tax revenue is still tied to the oil industry.
unethical_ban 5y ago
HWR_14 5y ago
Most bridges in Texas are less than 40 years old and 38% are less than 20 years old. This bridge was 50 years old and many bridges in Pittsburg are similarly old. Coincidentally, bridges have a 50-75 year lifespan. It's probably on the lower end in areas with tons of cold weather, salt and ice. Texas has less deteriorating weather in general. Hence the whole "northern cars turn to rust buckets" meme. Also, this corresponds to Pittsburg's heyday being 50 years ago.
dang 5y ago
Could you please omit swipes from your comments here? You're making a good point and the swipe spoils it. On HN, we want curious conversation in which people are thoughtful and respectful toward each other. The idea is to collaborate in figuring out the truth together. I know it often seems like other people don't care about that, but a lot of this is an artifact of the medium, because internet comments lack the out-of-band signals that we normally rely on to evaluate other people's intentions. Also, it's easy to perceive (and/or imagine) bad faith in others, and easy to underestimate the equivalent in oneself by 10x or more. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20objects%20mirror%20closer&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- second--shift 5y ago
  Doing god's work DanG, thank you. Re-reading some of the guidelines myself; it's good to stay familiar to keep HN the way it is.

ineedasername 5y ago

The issue is not unique to Pittsburgh, even if the location has its own specific challenges. More than 30% of US bridges are in need of repair or preservation work, and on rating bridges in either "good" or "fair" condition, the total bridge population has fewer than 50% rated as "good". [0] About 7-8% are rated poor. [0] https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges/ https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges/

mmazing 5y ago
Do you happen to know if their dataset is available to the public?
steveklabnik 5y ago
The issue isn’t unique to Pittsburgh, but the scale is. At ~450 bridges, it has one of the highest amounts in the world, especially for its size. (I am from Pittsburgh originally and used to bike over this bridge quite often.)
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I couldn't find ratings specific to Pittsburgh to determine what proportion of them fit into the Good/Fair/Poor categories. That's what would really be needed to assess the scale of the problem for Pittsburgh relative to the rest of the country. Although knowing what I do about the area I wouldn't be surprised if it is disproportionately worse: It's only somewhat recently that it's made a bit of an economic comeback from its downtrodden rustbelt days. I just wanted to clarify that, as much as Pittsburgh may be particularly problematic, its infrastructure issues were still replicated across most of the US.
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    So, I actually did look this up four days ago, but it seems that PennDOT changed their website? https://www.penndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/Pages/default.aspx https://www.penndot.gov/ProjectAndPrograms/Bridges/Pages/def... Those excel spreadsheets don't seem to do anything when I click on them. The note I took was "There are 25,437 bridges in PA. 9.59% of them were rated in “poor” condition last month, with only 34.37% of them being “good”". The original sheet was broken out by county, with Allegheny County basically being the same as the city of Pittsburgh in this regard. > I just wanted to clarify that, as much as Pittsburgh may be particularly problematic, its infrastructure issues were still replicated across most of the US. Absolutely, it is an issue everywhere for sure.

voisin 5y ago

> These bridges were built during times of relative wealth when the local steel and related industries were doing well. This is a problem that needs to be solved everywhere. Governments build infrastructure with nothing but hope that future tax revenue will support maintenance. There should be something like a retirement plan for this infrastructure where a certain amount is invested at the time of construction to support maintenance ongoing.

prirun 5y ago
I agree this is a good idea, but history has shown that if there is a pile of money sitting somewhere, governments blow it, just like many states have blown through public retirement funds. The fundamental problem is that people running governments are spending other people's money and they never have a problem doing that.
- voisin 5y ago
  Isn't this a problem that the pile of money isn't ring-fenced from the general coffers?
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  >The fundamental problem is that people running governments are spending other people's money and they never have a problem doing that. I would go further and state that voters are spending tomorrow's taxpayers' money and they never have a problem doing that. As a politician advocating for paying for things today, you are not going to win elections against someone who promises to push cash flow into the future and lower taxes today. Try replacing taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions (which can be pushed onto taxpayers decades in the future) with purchasing equivalent annuities from an insurance company today (which have to be properly accounted for and paid for today, requiring higher taxes today).
  - hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
    > I would go further and state that voters are spending tomorrow's taxpayers' money and they never have a problem doing that. This is what happens to retail politics when the population is trained to think for the short term. After all (successful) politicians merely follow trends.

opwieurposiu 5y ago

At the risk of seeming callous, I am not convinced it is obvious that bridges should never collapse. This is an unreachable goal that will just make bridges more expensive and create excessive regulation. No artifact of man is 100% reliable, the only rational goal is a certain number of "nines." The users of a system should decide how many nines they are willing to pay for. For me personally, A bridge with a 99.9% chance of not collapsing in a given year is good enough.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dijit 5y ago
Nobody is advocating for object permanence. People advocate for understood constraints of critical infrastructure. Engineers usually have knowledge about longevity and reliability of components. There are examples of man-made systems which absolutely require 100% reliability, but those still have lifetimes and will be destroyed at some point to be replaced with something else[0]. A bridge can be destroyed, but it should not collapse without prior warning. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY-XHAoVEeU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY-XHAoVEeU
- omnicognate 5y ago
  > Nobody is advocating for object permanence. I am. People need to understand that bridges continue to exist when they're not looking at them. (Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence)
  - mprovost 5y ago
- opwieurposiu 5y ago
  Did you watch this video? Tom claims in the video that the barrier is designed for up to a thousand year tide. That's essentially the same as the three nines standard I advocated.

jefftk 5y ago

> Penn Hills being a poignant example of this Link? I'm interested in reading more, but quickly searching didn't turn up anything

RC_ITR 5y ago
I think GP is referring to this resort and not the still-functioning inner-ring suburb of Pittsburgh? https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/penn-hills-resort https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/penn-hills-resort Weird example, since it's in Eastern PA, despite sharing a name with that suburb.
- jefftk 5y ago
  An abandoned resort doesn't sound like a city abandoning a suburban area and withdrawing services?
  - RC_ITR 5y ago
    Yeah but 40k people live in Penn Hills so… EDIT: Maybe it’s this [0], but lol Pittsburgh is not unique in having some abandoned homes. Literally every municipality ever in history has an area with abandoned homes. [0] https://archive.triblive.com/local/penn-hills/some-penn-hills-residents-frustrated-with-abandoned-homes/ https://archive.triblive.com/local/penn-hills/some-penn-hill...
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  It's been a while, but IIRC, Penn Hills (the one in Allegheny county) has seen reduced service from the Port Authority over the last 20 years, with many bus lines being outright discontinued/consolidated.

Maursault 5y ago

> there is a real problem here of how to build and maintain a modern city that is smaller than the older one that it replaces. I'm nearly certain Pittsburgh itself, the city, and its immediate surrounding boroughs has grown in population pretty steadily (though not significantly) since the steel boom even while the population of it's suburbs (and PA in general) have steadily lost population, though some areas around the city have grown, like near the airport, property values have skyrocketed to the point that I see a real estate bubble (cookie cutter single family houses built in the 1960's are going for $250K-$350K now, a lot to pay for a 60yo house in the burbs), which contrasts the other areas that have been completely gutted in population and deteriorated (like Ambridge, Aliquippa).

samatman 5y ago
Your near certainty is not justified by numbers which are publicly available and could have been consulted. The population of Pittsburgh proper is half what it was in 1950. Here's a convenient tabulation: http://population.city/united-states/pittsburgh/ http://population.city/united-states/pittsburgh/ You're equally wrong about the suburbs, which have grown as the city center shrank.
- Maursault 5y ago
  > You're equally wrong about the suburbs, which have grown as the city center shrank. Nonsense. My mistake, but my math is at least good enough to know I was not equally wrong. That would be far too unlikely, but if so, some kind of bizarre coincidence.
syki 5y ago
The population of metro area Pittsburgh has declined in the last 20 years and is over 100,000 people less than it was in 1970 [1]. Pittsburgh’s population today is 10% less than it was in 2000 and is considerably smaller than it was at its peak [2]. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23100/pittsburgh/population https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23100/pittsburgh/populati... [2] https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/pittsburgh-pennsylvania https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/pittsburgh-pennsylvania
5y ago

throwaway894345 5y ago

> Obviously no bridges should be coming down, but there is a real problem here of how to build and maintain a modern city that is smaller than the older one that it replaces. If an area's population shrinks such that it doesn't need / can't afford all of its bridges, why not prioritize the critical bridges for maintenance and close the others as they become unsafe. Why is this always posed as a dichotomy between letting bridges fail and funding maintenance for each and every bridge?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
burlesona 5y ago
The politics get nasty real fast. Nobody wants the bridge they regularly use to be shut down, regardless of whether the number of regular users is very small. In US politics, especially at the local level a fiercely-motivated vocal minority is very powerful (because hardly anyone else pays attention).
double_nan 5y ago
I'd say bad publicity. People are afraid of hard conversations and US politicians doesn't have any incentives to treat the voters are adults. Politicians treat ppl as children at best and cattle at worst. No one asks children what compromise to make: to buy bread or to buy milk if money are running low. This is the root cause of the problems from my point of view.

34679 5y ago

$250 million for public safety $59 million for public works 2021 Amended Operating Budget: https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/15962_2021_Amended_Operating_Budget_v2.pdf https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/15962_2021_Amen...

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

It's not just a "oh whoops the city shrank" problem, it's endemic to all American infrastructure. The problem is that local governments are permitted to de-prioritize public safety.

YeBanKo 5y ago

The media made it a show case for Biden's infrastructure plan, but it almost proves the opposite. It was first rated poor in 2011, from Pittsburgh Post Gazette [1]. The collapse came in the wake of troubling inspections dating to 2011 that show the aging span has been rated in poor condition, according to the National Bridge Inventory. Records from the inventory show that the bridge was consistently found to be in poor shape during inspections from 2011 to 2017, with estimated repairs at $1.5 million. Mr. Gainey said the bridge was last inspected in September 2021. A statewide report from last year noted the bridge was still in poor condition. The repair estimate was $1.5 mil in 2011. As someone posted in another comment, they spend 4 times more on public safety than on public works: $250 million vs $59 million. This seems like a failure of the city and state governments to prioritize. I know that Pittsburg has lots of bridges, but if they can't support it, then they should close some. This issue is neither unexpected, not a global or cataclysmic event. If the city needs constant maintenance help from the Federal government to maintain its infrastructure, then it simply can't afford it. [1] https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/01/28/pittsburgh-bridge-collapse-forbes-braddock-avenue-point-breeze-squirrel-hill/stories/202201280075 https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/01/28/pittsburg...