ICONS Bridges to 21st century

ICONS

Bridges to 21st century

The Caltrans/MTC design for the replacement of the earthquake-damaged existing span is a modest cable stayed section over a secondary ship channel using a single tower and the rest is a clean simple concrete box girder, the pier spacing and girder depth based on a conventional assessment of the tradeoffs between span and pier costs, officials say, then scaled up to allow for its width and length so it doesn’t look fussy. Jerry Brown, once dubbed Guv Moonbeam, now mayor of Oakland recently attacked the clean design as a “freeway on stilts.”

At a Metro Transp Comm meeting on the bridge, Brown wound up his peroration: “We want excellence, not average. This is our chance to create an icon, an Eiffel Tower or a Golden Gate, to lead us into the next century.”

Perhaps the best thing about getting into the next century will be that people won’t be able to invoke its imminence any more as a justification for extravagent nonsense. The depressing thought is that they’ll probably find new equally awful cliches to justify their whimsies for spending other people’s money. The new East Bay span of 10-lanes plus shoulders is already costing $1.5 billion and tolls have been doubled to pay for it.