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UC Berkeley structural engineer professor Abolhassan Astaneh has some urgent words for the Bay Area. Specifically, he's calling for the shut down of the Bay Bridge. Now. Soon. Just do it, he says. Ever since the new S-curve opened, the Bay Bridge has seen numerous accidents, including yesterday's big rig fatality. And a UCB smartypants is demanding the bridge's closure.
"You have to shut down this bridge immediately," Professor Astaneh tells KTVU."There's no doubt about it ... If Caltrans lets the public go on that bridge, they are committing a violation of this national standard that is criminally negligent."
When asked about the new S-curve, Astaneh doesn't hold back. "This is the most...how do I put it? The most criminally negligent thing that any engineer can do; to put sharp curves in the middle of a straight bridge." (He suggests pruning down the five lanes on the bridge to just three at the S-curve "to give room to smooth out the curves for drivers.)
But wait, it gets worse.
Putting aside the S-curve controversy and recent cable rod snap, which promoted the bridge's closure in October, the real danger is the eyebar fix. Astaneh claims that "the repair means the bridge is vulnerable and that it cannot withstand 85 mph winds or a 7.3 magnitude earthquake as required under federal transportation guidelines."
Should we shut the thing down? Take our poll below to find out.
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i drive over that bridge twice a day and i agree it needs to be shut down.
how did they build the golden gate in 3 years in the 1930s? lets just build another one of those, exactly how they did it at the time. that bridge seems to be fine!
Alas, that was in the days before Environmental Impact Reports, community input meetings, discretionary review procedures, etc.
Also, there's that pesky occupational safety thing. Eleven people died building the Golden Gate.
Why not just reduce the speed limit to 40mph for the entire duration of the S curve?
it's already 40mph at the s-curve. and reducing the speed for the entire bridge isn't going to work because drivers drive fast on straight shots and thats not going to change this.
the s curve is just a terribly engineered idea. they should shut down the current bay bridge and get working in overtime to get the other half of the eastern span built.
The speed limit is 40, and even with signs alerting drivers to slow to 35, they don't. I'm surprised Caltrans hasn't installed rumble strips yet. Driving over uneven pavement should be enough to get most people to slow down quite a bit. Hell, even removing one lane would be good because it would slow traffic down and allow more room for error.
Can we run those stats again... out of ALL the accidents that have occurred on the S-curve, how many of them were due to driver ERROR?
It's real annoying when Americans can never blame themselves for their actions! I've driven on S-curve type highways (@ 50 mph posted speed limits) daily in the Bay Area when I was a teenager and I'm still alive!
Might I add, the S-Curve I drove when I was 16 was on a two lane highway --- which actually required even more attention than the silly Bay Bridge S-Curve!
"out of ALL the accidents that have occurred on the S-curve, how many of them were due to driver ERROR?"
Great, so when some dumbass careens into my car while I'm driving the speed limit across the bridge, I can rest assured knowing that he probably made an error!
Bikes only on the bridge.
:)
Bikes only over the guardrail...
i would be stoked about bikes only on the bridge!
that would be like a park for bikes while they build a new bridge. Even better than Sunday streets
I would love to see bikes only on the bridge. Now that would be an excellent alternative.
the truck driver was going 10mph over the speed limit. sure, he shouldn't have been. but 10mph over? and the punishment for that is death? you've got to be kidding.
also, since the s-curve was put into place, commutes are what, 65% slower than they were?
it was a shitty temporary fix all around. get rid of it.
THANK YOU!
You covered it.
This guy reminds me of Chicken Little. The sky is falling the sky is falling. For crying out loud if people would just drive the speed limit we would not have these accidents!
what about when the bridge literally falls apart on top of cars during rush hour hmm? it was their fault too?
No but do your really think our government would let us cross a bridge knowing it is defective? Could this be a conspiracy?
uhm, i'm pretty sure it's defective, and i'm pretty sure that the goverment is aware it's defective at well... they didn't fix the broken i-bar - it literally looks like it's held together with bright yellow tape right now. they've even admitted it's probably still needs to be fixed, AGAIN. yet they're still letting 300,000 cars go across it every day?
i stand by my original statement that they should just scrap this bridge and put all their time and energy and money into building a new eastern span. have bart run 24 hours for a couple months and offer a bonus if the project is completed early. if all those banks can get bailed out, our bridge should surely be able to get bailed out too.
earth to mike: the government doesn't care about the safety of the infrastructure it creates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge#Investigation
Well that's Mississippi they live in a different world from us folks on the West Coast ;-)
yeah?
here's another example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig_ceiling_collapse
ps. that was the mississippi river in minneapolis, minnesota, brainiac.
Yea I saw that. Sorry.
LOL Ahnold is trying to kill off all the liberal granola-munchers in the Bay Area!
... All joking aside, though, the bridge does seem awfully dangerous. I commute daily in and out of SF from the East Bay by BART, but I still can't help but be worried about something happening.
There's far worse in SF: "Doyle Drive is currently ranked as the second worst bridge in the state, with a structural sufficiency rating of 2 out of 100."
How about putting up a huge fence along the side of the road, like those used to block falling rocks? It would at least reduce the risk of these kinds of crashes.
Separately though, can the new bridge design be simplified so it can be finished sooner? Fuck the "signature bridge." Let's just connect the skyway to the tunnel and be DONE with it. They can build a fancy tower later.
you're totally correct. on the right side of the s-curve, the wall is only 2-3 feet high. myself and my co-carpoolers have commented on it constantly and when i found out about yesterdays fatality i had to call one of them immediately and they were like I KNEW IT
BBD2K9
Bay Bridge Debacle 2009
"There's always some joker who thinks he's immune." - Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Theres a threshhold at which the expectation of compliance must give way to human nature. When youve got a fairly small pool of participants, this threshhold is usually *really* high, but it lowers dramatically the more people become involved. The design of something that services this many people with such heavy safety consequences should not only expect compliance, but also encourage compliance through a design that makes it easy to override or temper the human impulse to disregard rules. Cause there's always someone who thinks a particular rule is for other people.
Or, less pretentiously: Design for what you want them to do, but also design for what you know theyre going to do anyway.
The reason the bridge is still open is likely very simple: A green eye-shade working for the gubmint somewhere ran the numbers and demonstrated that closing the bridge as long as it would take to adequately improve its safety would have an economic impact "worth more" than the destruction of life and property that could be reasonably expected to occur sans additional bridge work. QED.
People have a god given right to drive fast. How dare caltrans ask people to slow down?? If there is stop and go traffic and cars run into each other, its not the driver's fault. It's caltrans fault! If the weather is bad and people crash then it's caltrans fault! And it is time to halt all road construction that causes roads to be curved.
Is it a bigger fuck-up to drive your truck 10mph too fast, or to build a bridge where driving 10mph too fast could kill the driver and/or someone else in the same stretch of road?
anonymous sfist commenter ftw!, well almost. gotta wait for the mcsweeney's report, but i think i'm kinda right.
i say shut the thing down. it's worth it for 24/7 bart service!
BART can't run 24/7. They can't even run past midnight. In the past when they tried to extend the hours of Bart they run into trouble with the maintence schedule. Because so many people work on Eastern Hours, BART opens at 4am and closes at Midnight -- that only leaves 4 hours to make repairs, etc. BART would break and have to be closed if it ran 24/7.
whosthatdog -- regarding the GGB -- we don't have the manufacturing facilities, the technology or a workforce with the skillset to rebuild the GGB.
Slow down idiots. There is a temporary bridge in place that isn't very safe, so be careful.
isn't it just SO much fun living here!can't wait for the next bridge collapse/earthquake etc; don'tja just get a thrill!
But merging 5 lanes of traffic into 3 isn't going to cause accidents from the backups and idiots speeding up to it anyhow?!
Lets get real people... if everyone slowed down like they're supposed to (and maybe will now after this truck accident) then the S-curve wouldn't be so accident prone after all.
BUT on another note -- can't handle 85 mph winds or a 7.3 earthquake?! Now that's a true issue to freak out over.
I think the idea would be to merge down to 3 lanes after the toll plaza where there is already a ton of merging, then open it up again after the S-curve. It might not actually affect traffic all that badly. Maybe a compromise of 4 lanes would do the trick.
Or just install the rumble strips. I don't understand why caltrans still has tricks up its sleeves that it hasn't deployed yet for the bridge. Rumble strips, big flashing signs, radar detectors, you name it. Maybe air horn blasts and signs that flash "SLOW DOWN!" if they detect a big truck barreling down the bridge?
a comment on sfgate mentioned that the impact of 300k cars hitting the rumblestrips all day long might be too many vibrations for the bridge to handle. i'm nowhere even close to an engineer so i couldn't tell you if that is bs or not but i'm terrified of the bridge as is so it's something to think about!
California drivers are going to ignore rumble strips just like the signs that say slow down.
I agree with previous comments that a curve on a bridge should not be that big of a deal. In fact, building a new bridge alongside an old one, particularly one as busy and important as the bay bridge, is an engineering feat all on its own realm and unfortunately, I think Caltrans engineers get bashed so much of the time that we forget this fact.
So - instead of rumble strips - maybe they should install modified speed bumps to force people to slow down. Other than that, I don't know if there's anything that will force CA drivers to slow down.
Here's one suggestion.
Take the big rig's wreck and park it on a nice pedestal right in a driver's view before you hit the S-Curve. You don't need much of the wreckage (less would be better, actually) so the pedestal wouldn't need to be very beefy.
That might be a nice way of saying to other drivers: "hey motherfucker, slow down or you'll end up like this poor fool."
-mm
I like the idea of speedbumps approaching S Curve, but I don't think my friends who drive motorcycles would be better off.
I just took one of my rare rental car drives for work across the Bay Bridge - drivers proving once again that they shove their gas pedal down until they run up near an obstacle. With the exception of a semi truck loaded with cars that slowed markedly down on the top heading west, most cars were going well above the 50 mph speed limit for most of the trip heading east and back west on the bridge earlier.... slowing down a tad for the S curve, but not much.
It's best to shut it down and inspect the entire span.
The issue is being diverted away from the real problem, if you consider the 1000's of cars that go accross the S-Curve every day without incident. The truck was loaded down with a shifting cargo, and going 50MPH in a Semi, isn't going to handle like a mini-cooper. He obviously over corrected, his load shifted, and being a bit higher than the guardrail/wall, he just hit it like a parking curb.
Easy as follows:
1. Speed deterrents at beginning of S-Curve, with signage.
2. Reinforce the guardrail to make it taller
3. Overlap 24-7 CHP and Bridge Patrol Presence.
Start the speed-zone 1/4 mile before S-Curve.
Finally, sue the contractor hired for the initial patch job, to cover the new patch job and closure costs. Hold CalTrans accountable for a bad structural assessment, and make Bart free while the bridge is down, and pay Bart the maintenance costs to keep the city connected.
p.s: Finish the damn new span already. Is it me or does it seem while commuting you never see anyone putting anything together? Like they work 4-hours a day. :P
This is a "signature" bridge! You can't expect them to get it done quickly!
Just think, eleven years ago they considered the views of the bridge from various perspectives so carefully:
http://www.dot.ca.gov/sfobb/
But rest assured, "[t]rough well-coordinated community meetings, sincere respect for public desires, and skillful incorporation of state-of-the-art advances in architecture and engineering, the San Francisco Bay Area will soon be home to the world’s longest single span, self-anchored suspension (SAS) bridge."
http://www.structuremag.org/article.aspx?articleID=270
That's not construction they're doing, it's sincere respect for public desires. Exactly what we deserve.
bart doesn't need to be free when the bridge is down, but it should be reduced to $2 to get through the transbay terminal each way.
when the bridge was down i was paying about $11 per day in transit fees all together (bart + muni). no wonder so many people drive.
If it means 24 hour BART, hell yes!
I like how the bridge has a twitter account. Props for keeping the info coming.