Bay Bridge

The Bay Bridge is a vital part of the roadway infrastructure here in the Bay Area. It connects San Francisco with the East Bay, the only such connection, and carries nearly 300,000 vehicles a day. In 1989 it was damaged by a 7.0 earthquake named Loma Prieta and closed for a month. Engineers determined that the eastern portion of the bridge was seismically unsafe and would have to be replaced. Eighteen years later we are still five years away from the completion of the replacement span. Nearly an entire generation will have passed.

One wonders then how important this project is. It took more than ten years merely to sort out what the replacement would look like and at least three more to iron out difficult design issues. This does not indicate any sense of urgency on the part of the decision makers. Looking at it dispassionately, the bridge stood for 50 years before it was damaged by an earthquake.

The Loma Prieta event resulted in exactly one death on the bridge. That's a pretty good record, one seismic fatality in what is now 68 years of operation. One month of down time due to earthquakes. Weighed against this is the scale of the bridge and its impact on the consciousness of all who see it, from whatever perspective. Much of the debate about what sort of bridge to build revolved around the issue of aesthetics versus cost.

Aesthetics won, I'm happy to report. In order for this to happen, a portion of the costs of the new bridge have been passed on to the users. Southern Californians insisted on this although they do not think it unfair that all Californians support their profligate use of automobiles by paying for their freeway projects.

In any event, the bridge was closed completely over the Labor Day weekend to accommodate construction and all those people in all those vehicles found another way to get around. By all accounts it worked pretty well, although there were no normal workdays in that time span and a lot of folks were out of town.

Caltrans, the public agency responsible for the bridge has been doing some pioneering type work on construction contracting and it paid off with this closure when their cooperative approached helped the contractor finish the work comfortably early. Everyone is happy and everyone looks good. Perhaps others will see the wisdom of this approach.