Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
structural health monitoring systems we have just mentioned will be useful
not just for research, but for real-time notification of structural problems,
so bridges can be repaired or, in severe emergency, evacuated. The bridge's
ability to survive a thousand years will depend on its strengthened ability
to withstand extreme events.
It is not a contradiction in terms to want more long-lived bridges, yet
ones delivered faster. That a bridge requires 10 to 20 years from conception
to commissioning is no help to the public or to the environment. The delays
and cost overruns subtract from the number and quality of infrastructure
items that can be built. The remarkably lengthy delivery times deserve
further careful study to help us understand where the holdups come from.
But within the legal environment in which we live, there will be no easy
solution. More accurate cost projections and “design-build” delivery methods
may help here and there, but cannot solve the larger problem.
They cannot help us escape the fact that the United States may have
taken a good idea much too far. Too many constraints, too many specialists,
too many bureaucracies, and too many stakeholders stumbling over each
other, causing delay upon delay—even when the proposed infrastructure is
meant to reduce an environmental problem, as when the job is to replace a
bridge that is causing pollution through excess congestion. Bad policy mak-
ing is not a gift to the environment. In the midst of dozens of conflicting
pressures and interests, funds get spent on satisfying multiple stakeholders
with short-term agendas, often to settle minor environmental preferences
in urban areas that are, after all, human constructions and can never be
pristine. To this problem of slow delivery, we have no solution now, except
to counsel further research and open public debate. We do believe that
the process as it now exists diminishes the funds that could be spent for
constructing finer infrastructure, including the long-lasting bridges that will
create more stable, sustainable environments.
We end with our hope that citizens will call for millennial bridges.
Avoiding cycles of rebuilding, each 1000-year bridge will be an optimistic
commitment to permanence of place. It will be an assertion that civilization
will survive and that our descendants will live here for thirty generations.
It will truly be a bridge to the future.