Bridges or Roads

Apparently, we can't have both.

I am interested in language, and how we always say roads and bridges, when clearly from an alphabetical perspective we should be saying bridges and roads...and aren't bridges just another form of roads in the most fundamental sense? All bridges are roads, but not all roads are bridges. But I digress.

Carmageddon, the fake media-induced meltdown that was to turn LA commutes into 5-hour long slogs never materialized. Neither did the carmageddon here in Sacramento when I-5 was shut down for three week stretches. But now, carmageddon has spread to the Ohio River today as steel manufactured in the 1960s (horrors!) is showing cracks as used on the I-64 Sherman Minton Bridge.

I don't believe this to be a toll bridge road. Yet think about how expensive it would be to replace this bridge, assuming replacement is the alternative -- what with unionized workers, steel from Pennsylvania, safety devices, environmental assessments, environmental impact reviews, modern concrete construction with as much reinforcing steel as in the original bridge, water diversion management, pile driving equipment costs, removal costs of the old bridge to include asbestos management planning, steel recycling, concrete pulverization, and the fifty six other things that I failed to mention. We got this bridge built chiefly through federal tax subsidies in the 1940's and 50's, but now the only options are likely public-private partnerships, with the private parts most certainly looking to install toll booths to collect $8 a pop for the 80,000 cars that will use this bridge daily. That's one of the fifty six other things -- a toll plaza.
I am not arguing for or against these things...they are just a function of our mod-durun world, things that were not considered important in 1964. They are today, and today the cost is three quarters of a million dollars per day to operate a bridge.

I would argue that the best course of action, should a bridge replacement be required, would be to ship 635 experienced Chinese bridge laborers over (not in container ships, jeez...but rather first class tickets on Singapore and United airlines), house them in government facilities in floating barges, provide them cots, three squares, and a dental plan, and pay them double what they are making building bridges at home which would be approximately $24 a day for an eight hour day instead of thirteen. In container ships, we could import pre-fab steel, concrete products, and specialized machinery from China (everything except bolts...no one trusts a Chinese bolt). Without the threat of walkouts and the like, the bridge would be completed in 13 months instead of 39, and we'd be millions millions! ahead. We'd easily generate enough "commerce" across that bridge to offset the government subsidies needed to bring in the Chinese to build it.

The Chinese are already building major sections of the Bay Bridge here in San Francisco. We saved $400,000,000 to do so because we weren't willing to pay $17 tolls and having to pay bloated American wages to build them, and indeed, we saved probably a lot more than that because we no longer have any capacity to build such bridge sections, and we would have had to create the tooling and fabrication facilities for just for this one-off project. That's why the Chinese were enlisted...because they have the specialists and the expertise these days for building bridges as they are building so many of them for their own selves and their own new cars.

Granted. I'm not considering the "soft costs" of howling unionized American workers and the costs associated with picketing Louisville's city hall, or the unearned wages that won't be spent buying bourbon and Fords and the additional GDP generated by DUI accidents, or the cost of unemployment insurance as we re-re-re-re-re-extend unemployment benefits on borrowed dollars, or the costs of providing emergency dental care to workers who no longer have medical insurance, or the depression in the Kentucky housing market caused by unemployed steelworkers (who were unwilling to work for $24 a day polishing steel) who are foreclosing on their homes and the cost of further Washington bailout programs used to shore up the housing sector, or the cost to savers now making 0.2% return on their savings, or the costs associated with the downward pressure on all wages by the importation of cheaper labor...

These soft costs might, just might, be a tad more than the savings by Chinese workers, making my plan truly untenable, but because soft costs are never calculated in the engineering economics of bridge building or in the economics engineering of Washington, my plan is fucking sterling.