Airhead Agency Should Buy Brooklyn Bridge Quick

There is a popular revolt sweeping the country against the FHWA’s major urban highway enhancement program of the last two decades – HOV lanes – and the FHWA cannot think of anything useful to say, let alone to do. Heads in the sand, these political hacks engage themselves instead in meaningless happy talk. So we have an announcement that FHWA administrator Kenneth Wykle is “challenging industry” to build bridges with a 100-year life. Last time we visited New York City the Brooklyn bridge seemed to be holding up fine, despite it being well over a century old? Didn’t the London Bridge last several hundred years? And some Chinese bridges over a thousand years? So “industry” seems to have solved the Wykle “challenge” quite a while back.

There happens to be a well-developed subdiscipline of accounting called life-cycle cost analysis. It analyses the trade-offs of building for different life lengths, modeling the interaction of the different capital costs, maintenance costs, and varying costs of capital or interest rates. Major bridges probably deserve to be separately analyzed one by one, and lesser bridges by class at least. When tolled these sorts of calculations have to be made.

So why would these Administrator’s people plonk for 100 years life as some kind of generalized optimum? We asked around and the best we could get by way of an answer was: ‘Someone thought a hundred years sounded a good objective because most bridges don’t last that long.’

Uh dah! Government by windy PR flacks we’ve got. There ARE still serious people there but they operate in an atmosphere where it is regarded as uncouth to raise almost any difficult or important policy issue. Wimps and airheads are in charge.