It would be an additional 40 years before the U.S. Purcell and his engineering colleagues chose a double suspension span for the west side and cantilevered steel trusses on the east based on three primary factors: a limited budget, San Francisco Bay geology, and navigation demands, wrote architect Donald MacDonald in “Bay Bridge: History and Design of a New Icon.” And 1930s-era politicians had little or no formal say about how the bridge would look. In the 1930s, Bay Bridge Chief Engineer Charles Purcell didn’t need four years and $155 million for an environmental impact study. When asked why engineers and builders 80 years ago could work so much faster, a contractor on the bridge half-jokingly described today’s construction landscape as the equivalent of asking workers to erect a bridge in record time with their hands tied behind their backs. ![]() “Since then, the values of our society have shifted 180 degrees, and it is reflected in how long it takes to get things done.” “In the 1930s, the bridge itself was the thing people valued, and the engineers and contractors were in charge,” said Randy Rentschler, Metropolitan Transportation Commission government affairs director. The reasons behind the gap say much about how big construction projects have changed from the time of the Great Depression, when creating jobs was paramount, to the modern era where worker safety and environmental laws have an enormous influence on the design, pace and cost of what is built. Why can’t they do things the way they used to? ![]() ![]() Put another way, the entire 1936 crossing cost $30,000 a foot in adjusted 2013 dollars while the shorter new span is setting back taxpayers $550,000 per foot. Construction is taking more than twice as long, and the price tag - $6.4 billion - is 41/2 times higher than engineers estimated. And workers did it ahead of schedule and for $78 million, well under budget.ĭecades later, when the seismically shaky 2-mile eastern span needed to be replaced, California took five years just to figure out what the new span should look like and design it. OAKLAND - In the early 1930s, California designed and built the 8-mile Bay Bridge - west and east spans linked by the world’s biggest bore tunnel - in a mere 51/2 years.
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