Pittsburgh Bridge Collapse

Just when the infrastructure issue seemed to be settled for awhile, the failure of the 52-year-old Fern Hollow bridge in Pittsburgh has reawakened it, especially as the collapse took place just a few hours before President Biden was scheduled to speak in Pittsburgh. “I hope it’s a wake-up call to the nation that we need to make these infrastructure investments,” Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman told local reporters.

Photo from the Pittsburgh Department of Public Safety. Click image for a larger view.

No one yet knows why the bridge collapsed, but numerous media reports say that it was rated to be in poor condition. Inspection reports reveal, however, that the part of the bridge in poor condition was its superstructure while its substructure was considered “satisfactory.” Bad substructure may cause a bridge to collapse, but not, generally, bad superstructure. A 2017 inspection concluded that the bridge “meets minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as is.” As a result, the bridge wasn’t scheduled to be repaired or replaced under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The bridge collapsed between 6 am and 7 am on Friday as it was being crossed by an articulated 60-seat bus. These buses weigh a little more than 20 tons, which should not have been enough to collapse the bridge. The good new is hardly anyone rides transit anymore, so this 56-seat bus was occupied by just two passengers and the driver. Several automobiles were also on the bridge when it collapsed. A few people were hospitalized, but none with life-threatening injuries.

The bridge was 447-feet long and had a central span of 166 feet. A photo of the bridge reveals the substructure consisted of supporting diagonal pillars at either end with cantilevered girders holding up the superstructure in between. As the girders met in the middle, they and the pillars formed an arch. I don’t see how a poor superstructure could have led the bridge to fail, but if the steel substructure collapsed, it would have been a surprise to the bridge inspectors who repeatedly rated it to be satisfactory in bi-annual reviews. It is possible that the inspections failed to note problems; I notice that inspectors claim that the bridge carried an average of 14,500 vehicles a day in every year since 1994, which is either an astounding coincidence or a sign they didn’t really know how many use the bridge.

The bridge was owned by the city of Pittsburgh, whose transportation agency is trendily named the “Department of Mobility and Infrastructure.” The city has adopted five mobility principles for that agency:

• No one dies or is seriously injured traveling on city streets.
• Every household in Pittsburgh can access fresh fruits and vegetables within 20 minutes travel of home, without the requirement of a private vehicle.
• All trips less than 1 mile are easily and enjoyably achieved by non-vehicle travel.
• No household must spend more than 45% of household income to satisfy basic housing, transportation and energy needs.
• The design, maintenance and operation of city streets reflects the values of our community.

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In keeping with these principles, the agency spends a lot of effort on emerging mobility technologies such as bike sharing and scooters, complete streets, pedestrian programs, and traffic calming. Meanwhile, it has done little or no maintenance on the Fern Hallow bridge; as one Pittsburgh resident says, “as far as I know [the bridge] has not had any significant maintenance work done since” it was built. She adds that several other Pittsburgh bridges are also suffering from deferred maintenance.

The city’s capital budgets reveal that, between 2018 and 2022, the city spent or is spending a little more than $6 million a year on maintenance and rehabilitation of bridges (with none earmarked for the Fern Hollow bridge) but nearly $8 million a year on complete streets. Many planners believe complete streets will make streets safer, but I don’t see any evidence of that in the data, which show pedestrian fatalities increasing even as more cities follow this fad.

The 2017 inspection of the Fern Hollow bridge estimated that restoring the bridge to good condition would cost $1.5 million. Instead of fixing it, the city spend more than $1.3 million in bike sharing last year.

The infrastructure bill included $40 billion for bridges. Despite President Biden’s promise to “fix them all,” this is enough money to repair only about half the 43,000 bridges rated in poor condition. However, there were 138,000 bridges rated in poor condition in 1990; at the rate the number is declining, they all would have been fixed by 2035 even without the infrastructure bill.

However, the infrastructure bill may not accelerate that timeline by much. The money will be distributed to the states using a formula. It will be up to the states to decide how much to pass along to cities and counties. Even though almost twice as many city- and county-owned bridges are in poor condition than state-owned bridges, many states are probably going to keep most of the money for themselves, which may be one reason why the Fern Hollow bridge isn’t on the state’s list of bridges to be fix under the new law.

Second, to the extent that cities like Pittsburgh receive any of the funds, they have a history of merely reprogramming some of the money they had been spending on bridges into other projects, such as bike sharing and complete streets. The results may be little net increase in spending on bridges.

The real problem is not a lack of funds but poor priorities. Why should the city transportation department be concerned about people’s ability to reach fruits and vegetables in 20 minutes without a car? Does bike sharing, which few people use, truly reflect the values of the community more than maintaining its infrastructure? If the Fern Hollow bridge collapse is a wake-up call, it should wake up cities and counties that allow their infrastructure to decline so they can fund urban planning fads such as complete streets and scooters.

Update: As LazyReader notes, a physicist named Greg Kochanski noticed serious rust problems in the substructure of the bridge nearly four years ago. One beam was rusted through entirely. He added that, after he reported the problem to the city, the city responded by removing the detached beam — but not replacing it with anything else.

Another report from two years ago indicated that a state fuel tax meant for bridge report was diverted to pay for state police instead. It sounds like Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh are guilty of some serious neglect.