From what I remember, that set of bridges has had problems with chunks coming off and hitting people as they drive on the highway. A chunk of concrete at 70mph is absolutely lethal.
I guess you don't get wind, rain, or snow there.
Hahahah. It's michigan. We get some of the more intense winter weather in the states.
That's actually part of the problem, it's an extremely variable climate, we get over 100F in the summer and under 0F in the winter. It results in a lot of road wear compared to more southerly states, due to the freeze-thaw cycle.
The west side of the state is comparable to New York, tons of lake effect snow. No hurricanes here though.
https://goo.gl/maps/MD6ErnBZ4mzDdkup9
If you spin round to look west at the M73 flyover you'll see they're a kind of tapered oval section, but they're also forming a triangle with the road deck which makes the structure a lot stiffer.
I was surprised to discover how much concrete bends when I was doing radio comms work on the Queensferry Crossing project a bit north of Edinburgh. The road deck was built as steel sections with concrete on top and lifted into place, one side then the other. With them "unbalanced", one side lifted on but the other not lifted yet, the top of the 600-foot concrete towers - the top had a working platform about the size of four parking spaces - bent over by about six feet...
They've been replacing a bunch of bridges on I-94 in Detroit. Many of them had lots of rebar showing on the pillars where the concrete had crumbled a way. Not just a bar showing, but a decent sized grid. It doesn't surprise me that a pedestrian bridge got overlooked with all the road bridges in need. Still no excuse.
It's not just spending, which isn't efficient. Michigan has been (for decades) on the of the lowest spending states per capita on roads. This is across both Republicans and Democrats in the governor's seat.
Its because public spending on infrastructure is "socialism" and it is better to give loans to private companies and let "the free market" fix the infrastructure; any day now.
Its an unexplained miracle the US hasn't collapsed yet.
Throwing money at the problem doesn't work if you suck at throwing and can't hit the problem.
nonsense. It's the governments job to do this maintenance. There are entire departments dedicated to it. The problem is that they are underfunded, in part because the money goes ummm somewhere else, and because for some reason taxing people or business enough to cover state expenses is considered bad practice.
Often road widening is based on projections (which are almost universally wrong): https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2021/09/09/every-traffic-pr...
So the other poster was making the exact same point that you made (unsarcastically), but it sounds like you may not have realized that? At any rate, you both seem to be largely in agreement about the current state of affairs.
Interestingly, a lot of these people also aren't in favor of paying less for less nothing.
> Biden’s secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, has argued that this kind of socialist experiment would be unacceptable — even to stop babies from starving to death. “Let’s be very clear,” Buttigieg told CBS, “This is a capitalist country. The government does not make baby formula, nor should it. Companies make baby formula.”
(For the record, "Socialism" would not fix the US's bridge or baby formula woes because they are both the results of decades of neglect and bad policy that can't be undone in a year.)
Singapore would disagree that government manufacture of baby formula represents socialism. The government can do what it wants without impairing the market. Where socialism comes in is when the government intervenes to protect its baby formula industry, by barring competitors from participating in the market or by subsidizing its own formula manufacture with tax revenues.
It isn't, my comment is a jab on US politics and discourse; though neoliberalism and "minarchism" has corroded the existing infrastructure through "austerity" (money redirection towards forever wars and imperialism) and red-scare tactics.
> The 2,702-page bipartisan bill, summarized in a fact sheet issued by the White House, contains $550 billion in new spending, in addition to funding allocated each year for various infrastructure projects. The allocation for roads and bridges ($110 billion), railroads ($66 billion), airports ($25 billion) and ports ($17 billion) alone totals $218 billion, which is just over 18 percent of the overall spending over the 10-year period— significantly higher than the 11 percent touted by Trump.
> An additional $240 billion is going toward upgrading and improving the nation's power grids ($73 billion), water infrastructure ($55 billion, plus another $8 billion for Western water infrastructure in response to ongoing droughts across the West), public transit systems ($39 billion) and broadband ($65 billion). In the past, all of that has typically fallen under the "public infrastructure" umbrella and would raise the share of "real infrastructure" to at least 38 percent.
> The addition of more contentious elements that arguably fall under a looser definition of public infrastructure—such as safety enhancements ($11 billion), electric vehicle charging stations ($7.5 billion) and electric school buses ($7.5 billion), along with $47 billion for cybersecurity and climate change mitigation—would tip the total over 44 percent.
I don't think that's an exception either. The state of infrastructure in this country is indeed terrible and people have been sounding the alarm since forever, and it just never gets fixed. But there is always money for new tanks that get sent straight to the boneyard, or fighting whatever extremely-important war we're into this year.