San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Joe Mathews: Bridge’s lone virtue — lesson for the future
How do you learn from a really big mistake?
Walk across it.
So recently I took a walk across the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island. This piece of the bridge is our generation’s biggest California mistake. The eastern span was completed in 2013 — a decade late, costing seven times official projections and dogged by safety concerns.
However, the bridge does have one virtue: It holds lessons for the future, as California faces the kind of enormous challenges that will necessitate big projects. After the cautious governorship of Jerry Brown, new state leaders are promising big initiatives on infrastructure, taxation and early childhood.
Before they do, they should read “A Tale of Two Bridges” by Stephen D. Mikesell, a Davis historian.
Today’s cynical conventional wisdom is that mega-projects — those costing $1 billion or more — are doomed to fail. But Mikesell, by comparing the successful 1936 Bay Bridge with the troubled 2013 eastern span, argues otherwise.
He points to big lessons from 1936. First, local leaders built broad consensus about the project’s purpose: better connecting San Francisco and Oakland. Second, political people made the political decisions about the bridge, and technical people made the technical decisions about engineering and design. Third, costs were estimated accurately and the bridge came in under budget. And finally, the bridge builders used construction methods proved in other bridges, emphasizing function over artistry.
The 2013 eastern span didn’t pass these tests.
The bridge was a divisive issue. Cost estimates were way off. Technical decisions about bridge design were made politically. And the big political decision — to build an expensive new span instead of a less costly retrofit of the old span — was made by technical people at Caltrans.
Ultimately, warnings from bridge engineers were ignored as Bay Area political leaders chose what they saw as the most visually attractive option — a self-anchored suspension bridge — even though this less common design created many problems.
To walk the span is to get a firsthand sense of a bridge gone wrong. The walkway itself offers the first clue: It’s on the wrong side of the bridge, the south side, which provides you a view of Oakland’s port, instead of the north side, with beautiful views of the North Bay. The walk is also marred by pollution and noise from cars and trucks; eastbound traffic is so close it feels like it might run you over.
After an hour of walking, I reached the bridge’s signature tower and curve. But up close, the tower isn’t beautiful. It also created cost overruns and is the site of many structural problems, including saltwater intrusion into the foundation and substandard welds.
The bridge is also a failure because of what it didn’t do. Big projects should be transformational. But this span didn’t increase bridge capacity, or improve traffic. Some engineers say the new span may be more prone to fail in an earthquake than the bridge it replaced.
The bridge was such a fiasco that prominent officials skipped its 2013 opening, leaving Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom to handle the ceremony. He expressed hope the bridge would inspire “a generation to dream big dreams and do big things.”
Now that Newsom is becoming governor — and promising big things — he’ll need to live by the bridge’s perverse lessons: Any big project must be truly transformational, providing a service or a connection that truly changes people’s lives. Paradoxically, the execution of such transformations must be practical and risk-averse, emphasizing function over form.
How might such lessons be applied? For example, if Newsom wants to build a single-payer health care system, it shouldn’t be the gold-plated model that progressive groups have been advocating, but something simple, cheap and sturdy, covering everyone. He’ll need to resist efforts to make his promised new systems for taxation, home building and early childhood highly complex with loads of new formulas.
Tired and sweaty after reaching Yerba Buena Island, I called for a Lyft to take me back to my car in Oakland. But no driver would come. So I trudged back across the bridge, on sore feet, repeating my earlier mistake.