When people say "gee, it takes way to long to build anything", they're using a language of time, but I suspect really talking about money: "gee, we seem to be spending a whole lot of time and money before we actually put anything in the ground."
To that end, I'm not sure the planning metric is completely valid. "Let's take some extra time on the geology" is different from "let's spend millions saving some snail and moving 6 Swainson's hawk nests before we do anything." Technically they're both "planning" but there is a qualitative difference.
I'm not saying this to be critical of the latter behavior. Wealthier societies can worry more about snails and hawks; poor societies just need the stupid bridge built now. But I do think it makes your "planning" comparison somewhat less valid.
- There are so few pre-1920 bridges that I'd exclude them from the trend. And, are their longer timelines driven by large suspension bridges being a newer phenomenon?
- Is there a Robert Moses effect where bridges that he built were faster? I'd be curious if the analysis changes if you look at non-Moses bridges.
- Please consider posting a table of bridges and dates somewhere. It obviously took you a lot of time to build this and could be referenced by somebody in the future.
Re: the "sense of urgency in countries like Japan and Korea who were able to build their commercial shipbuilding industries up from virtually nothing. Perhaps the trick to making US infrastructure construction proceed more quickly is figuring out how to instill this culture of urgency in the agencies responsible for building it".
Apparently the annual national health check in Japan is described as "human docking into a harbor or shipyard" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hHJQDy-wL4) which makes me think about how the (ship)builder culture is deeply-rooted in e.g. Japan, in a way that's not in America.
A small correction on the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge: Planning for the Big Dig, which the bridge was built as part of, began in 1982. But the design for the Charles River crossing went through several iterations and a lot of controversy before the bridge that was built was even suggested, and that sometime in the early 90s.
I think this would fall under my "beginning of broader transit studies" criteria and thus the 1982 date would be correct, especially because I think earlier iterations still had some sort of bridge there (the Scheme Z overpass monstrosity).
I'm curious about the planning phase. I'm a PNWer, and it seems like large public projects here have several kinds of planning phases. One is engineering planning -- how are we going to build the bridge, environmental mitigation, etc. This is all largely civil engineering work. This doesn't seem to have become inordinately more complicated over time. Another is financing planning. What entities are going to pay for this, what is the split, what are the underlying bond and tax sources. I don't know if this has become more complicated, tho it seems like maybe it has. And then there is what I will call the "rights" planning stage -- whose property is this going to affect, and allowing all the legal challenges around that to play out. This seems like maybe it has become inordinately more complicated. Curious what you see.
When people say "gee, it takes way to long to build anything", they're using a language of time, but I suspect really talking about money: "gee, we seem to be spending a whole lot of time and money before we actually put anything in the ground."
To that end, I'm not sure the planning metric is completely valid. "Let's take some extra time on the geology" is different from "let's spend millions saving some snail and moving 6 Swainson's hawk nests before we do anything." Technically they're both "planning" but there is a qualitative difference.
I'm not saying this to be critical of the latter behavior. Wealthier societies can worry more about snails and hawks; poor societies just need the stupid bridge built now. But I do think it makes your "planning" comparison somewhat less valid.
Great analysis, thank you.
- There are so few pre-1920 bridges that I'd exclude them from the trend. And, are their longer timelines driven by large suspension bridges being a newer phenomenon?
- Is there a Robert Moses effect where bridges that he built were faster? I'd be curious if the analysis changes if you look at non-Moses bridges.
- Please consider posting a table of bridges and dates somewhere. It obviously took you a lot of time to build this and could be referenced by somebody in the future.
Hyperlink error - the link that’s supposed to be about a bridge in Atlanta instead goes to the previously mentioned Pensacola bridge’s Wikipedia page!
nice work...interesting observation about replacement vs new bridges..
Re: the "sense of urgency in countries like Japan and Korea who were able to build their commercial shipbuilding industries up from virtually nothing. Perhaps the trick to making US infrastructure construction proceed more quickly is figuring out how to instill this culture of urgency in the agencies responsible for building it".
Apparently the annual national health check in Japan is described as "human docking into a harbor or shipyard" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hHJQDy-wL4) which makes me think about how the (ship)builder culture is deeply-rooted in e.g. Japan, in a way that's not in America.
A small correction on the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge: Planning for the Big Dig, which the bridge was built as part of, began in 1982. But the design for the Charles River crossing went through several iterations and a lot of controversy before the bridge that was built was even suggested, and that sometime in the early 90s.
I think this would fall under my "beginning of broader transit studies" criteria and thus the 1982 date would be correct, especially because I think earlier iterations still had some sort of bridge there (the Scheme Z overpass monstrosity).
I'm curious about the planning phase. I'm a PNWer, and it seems like large public projects here have several kinds of planning phases. One is engineering planning -- how are we going to build the bridge, environmental mitigation, etc. This is all largely civil engineering work. This doesn't seem to have become inordinately more complicated over time. Another is financing planning. What entities are going to pay for this, what is the split, what are the underlying bond and tax sources. I don't know if this has become more complicated, tho it seems like maybe it has. And then there is what I will call the "rights" planning stage -- whose property is this going to affect, and allowing all the legal challenges around that to play out. This seems like maybe it has become inordinately more complicated. Curious what you see.
It's hard to tell because so few bridges have easily available information at this level of granularity.