You cannot put the entire weight of the 70's safety culture to an engineer "showing off"

I bet there was a much more complex and nuanced analysis which included crossing ship dimensions, budget, time to completion, available technology, composition of the local seabed etc..

Designing a bridge is proper engineering and not that easy.

The '70s were also a transitional period in bridge design where truss bridges were being phased out in favour of newer types of hybrid suspension bridge. Many of the iron and steel bridges of the 1890s through the 1970s were later replaced with suspension bridges or arch span bridges because they used less material and could be architecturally adapted to the area better. So some truss bridges were made as much for appearance as function in order to compete with the futuristic hybrid suspension bridges like the 1967 Ponte Morandi or the 1987 replacement Sunshine Skyway.

Believe me, an engineering student that sees that, immediately understands the problems after taking the first science of construction lessons.

You do need need the truss at all. If the truss fails (in any of the three spans), it brings down two adjacents spans.

It's just a show off.

There's been at least 50 years, probably more like 60 or 70, of advances in the art (much less pedagogy) that those students have and the bridge engineer did not.

> Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.

...in other words.