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New York City has had two major recent new bridge replacements that probably about 20M people can name: the Mario Cuomo (formerly Tappan Zee) and the Kosciuszko
by rrdharan 3y ago
New York City has had two major recent new bridge replacements that probably about 20M people can name: the Mario Cuomo (formerly Tappan Zee) and the Kosciuszko bridge.
I’d argue the Bayonne Bridge raising kinda counts since it was almost a rebuild and more impressive in many ways since it stayed open the whole time.
Meanwhile in the San Francisco Bay Area they replaced the Bay Bridge…
- mannykannot 3y agoThe Tappan Zee bridge certainly wasn't built with the intention of replacing it after 65 years. Nor, fortunately, was the George Washington bridge.
- rrdharan 3y agoAgreed I was just addressing the parent poster question of whether anyone can name a major bridge built in the last fifty years…
- 0110101001 3y ago> Started on the cheap during the Korean War, the Tappan Zee was deliberately built to last just 50 years. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/nyregion/a-bridge-that-has-nowhere-left-to-go.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/nyregion/a-bridge-that-ha...
- mannykannot 3y agoI can't argue with that!
- colatkinson 3y agoThe old Tappan Zee was basically a perfect encapsulation of "dumb midcentury infrastructure decisions." 1. Built to last only 50 years to save on materials (as the other commenter noted). 2. Built over literally the widest possible part of the Hudson because the governor got in a pissing contest with the Port Authority and wanted all the tolls to go to the state, which wouldn't have been the case had it been built like 2 miles south where the river is narrower. 3. Designed with zero redundancy, such that a "critical fracture could make the bridge fail completely because its supports couldn’t transfer the structure’s load to other supports." [0] So yeah if we're being real, 50 years was quite optimistic. The new Tappan Zee is apparently supposed to last 100 years, though given the incidents with substandard materials being used, as well as ever-increasing traffic, who knows. That said, driving over a bridge 10 years past its planned EOL and being able to look down directly to the water through gaps in the concrete was always a nice feature though -- who needs coffee when you've got that to get your heart rate up! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tappan_Zee_Bridge_(1955%E2%80%932017)#Planning_and_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tappan_Zee_Bridge_(1955%E2%80%...
- njarboe 3y ago"dumb midcentury infrastructure decisions." Keeping in mind that mid-century Japan and Germany were in ruins and the possibility of nuclear annihilation of urban centers very much at the top of many people minds. 50 years may have seemed an optimistic survival rate of built structures at the time.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThe eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which had previously been a cantilever bridge, which was damaged during the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, and shown to have quite obvious seismic deficiencies. Its replacement is a self-anchored suspension bridge. The original western span, actually a double suspension bridge, remains standing, as constructed in 1933, 91 years ago.