Republcan Governor Tim Pawlenty’s bridge:
RickScott’s foot bridge:
There was so much hope for that bridge:
First-of-its-kind pedestrian bridge “swings” into place. “FIU is about building bridges and student safety. This project accomplishes our mission beautifully,” -President Mark B. Rosenberg. https://t.co/x8gPM9A4DG #worldsahead pic.twitter.com/mPEMeh2zmw
— FIU (@FIU) March 10, 2018
Republicans in Congress have kept funding away form Amtrak.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/video/recent-amtrak-derailments-51888715
See this NYMag report for the rest.
It will also probably be greeted with a shrug in cities such as the biggest city in Maryland, 80 miles north of the Harry W Nice Memorial Bridge. To drive along North Avenue, a main thoroughfare running from east to west, is to run the gauntlet of divots and humps left by heavy buses and trucks pounding the asphalt in the summer heat. The road is a craggy patchwork where pipes have been dug up but then not properly repaved and where the outlines of long unused streetcar tracks are re-emerging.
Street kerbs are cracked or collapsed while traffic lights dangle from overhead cables and sway in the wind. In 2014, East 26th Street collapsed in heavy rain, washing away cars. The 101-year-old Hanover Street Bridge is notoriously riddled with potholes. Trains linking New York and Washington are forced to slow down when they pass through the major bottleneck underneath the city that is the Baltimore and Potomac tunnel, which opened in 1873.
The collapsed East 26th Street in Baltimore in 2014. Do not … DO NOT … fail to watch this video to the end:
We even have our own forgotten and forlorn infrastructure in My Fair City. Our Republican mayor and our Republican state house rep (Sarah Anderson) have manged to keep work from being done on this annoying bit of infrastructure. I just hope it does not fall down.
http://www.plymouthmn.gov/departments/city-council-/goals-objectives/county-road-9-bridge-advocacy
I know, I know, it is not all Republicans. Democrats too, to some extent. But the fact is, the Republicans have more fallen or crashed stuff on their hands, and in the state houses and Congress, they are the ones stonewalling the process.
I look forward to this all changing once a) we throw the bums out (at the Federal and state level) and b) we then hold the Dem’s feet to the fire.
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Greg:
Really?
Are you sure it wasn’t Karl F. Rolvaag’s bridge?
He was governor when it was built.
Even you should be intelligent to realize that infrastructure needs to be maintained.
dean:
The I35 bridge was being maintained. In fact it was the repair vehicles weight, combined with the too small originally installed gusset plates which caused the collapse.
I think it is just a bit off the mark to blame republicans or Governor Pawlenty for the bridge collapse.
But that is just my personal opinion.
RickA, the bridge was working fine when it was built.
Also, as a side note, we had the option of including a great public transit thingie with the new replacement bridge, but the Republicans nixed it because they hate the planet.
Cut the useless military budget by 50% and we have tons of money for important stuff!
Yeah, the notion that the military “suffered mightily” under President Obama is just another lie (all too successful, unfortunately) spread by the right because, well, President Obama wasn’t white so it was impossible for him to do anything the correct way. The fact that it was stronger than ever before when Trump took over is meaningless — just as the facts that the economy was (and had been) growing when Trump took over was overlooked. The modern right is completely empty of integrity.
Regarding the FIU pedestrian bridge…it seems to me like an apt metaphor for the Trump presidency. The parallels are stunning.
It was supposed to just”look” like a suspension bridge, but not really “be” a suspension bridge.
The “huge” 950 ton concrete and steel structure with a 174 foot span had cracks develop soon after its inauguration, but they were not considered serious enough for the watch dogs of the project to act to protect the public and divert traffic while the problem was studied.
We don’t yet know whether or not anyone was monitoring the dimensional stability of the structure with something more technically sophisticated than eyeballs or tape measures, you know, things from the age of coal.
Nobody had enough creative imagination to realize that the span was in a fairly rapid (geologically speaking ) state of collapse.
The design of the structure looked really really hinky to anyone with actual hands on real life experience with real life stuff. But theoretically, on paper, it was really really good. Just like a Trump University diploma.
You’re really stretching there. Trump U diploma is not good on paper. I don’t know about structural engineering, but Trump’s constructions have good architecture.