Why Was the Tappan Zee Bridge So Costly?

New York completed construction of a new Tappan Zee Bridge, allowing the state to implode the old one this past weekend. But a comparison of the two bridges raises the question: why is bridge construction so expensive?

The original bridge cost $81 million in 1950 dollars. Using a GDP deflator, that’s less than $700 million in today’s dollars. Yet the replacement bridge cost $4 billion, well over five times as much.

First, it should be noted that the bridge is in a stupid location where the Hudson River is three miles wide, while a few miles downstream it is just a mile wide. That significantly increased the cost of both bridges, but the location was selected due to politics: under an interstate compact, all bridge tolls across the Hudson within 25 miles of the Statue of Liberty go to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. New York Governor Dewey wanted to keep the tolls to help pay for other roads, so he chose a location just two-tenths of a mile outside the 25-mile radius.

One reason why the new bridge was more expensive than the old is that it is supposed to be better built. To save money, the state built the old bridge “thin and light,” which made it more vulnerable to long-term wear and tear. The bridge was also “fracture critical,” meaning engineers failed to include any redundancies so that the failure of a single part could cause the entire bridge to fail, as happened with an Interstate 5 bridge in 2013. Exacerbating the problem is that the state failed to properly maintain the Tappan Zee Bridge, shortening its life.

Another reason is that the new bridge supposedly has a higher capacity for moving traffic. The old bridge accommodated seven lanes, three in each direction plus one reversible lane. The new bridge is supposedly built to accommodate ten lanes, but typically the state is only striping eight lanes. The space for the other two lanes is being held in reserve in case someone comes up with funds to run commuter trains across the bridge.

But even ten lanes is only 43 percent more than seven lanes. That plus the improved, non-fracture-critical design shouldn’t account for a quintupling of costs.
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A third reason sometimes cited for the high cost is the length of time it took to plan the new bridge. The state spent $100 million on studies and thirty years of planning, holding 400 public meetings. But much of that $100 million would have to be spent anyway on engineering studies (and actually $100 million sounds cheap compared to the $200 million Oregon and Washington spent planning a Columbia River bridge that was never built). And while thirty years of delays may have increased costs, such increases are accounted for in the adjustments for inflation.

Considering the expanded capacity, improved design, and adjustments for inflation from 1950 dollars, the new Tappan Zee Bridge probably should have cost about $2 billion, or half what it actually cost. The difference is probably due to government inefficiency and New York politics.

Counting ten lanes (even though the bridge is currently striped for just eight) means the bridge cost about $133 million per lane mile. Elsewhere in the world, France’s privately built Millau Viaduct cost about half a billion dollars in today’s money. It only has four lanes and is half the length of Tappan Zee (but many times taller), but cost about $95 million per lane mile. In China, the six-lane Sutong Bridge is five miles long; after adjusting for inflation, it cost about $70 million per lane mile.

It seems to the Antiplanner that $133 million per lane mile is excessive for bridgework. Before passing an infrastructure bill, Congress should investigate what makes American construction so expensive and work to reduce those costs, thereby reducing the cost of an infrastructure bill.

Speaking of an infrastructure bill, the Federal Highway Administration says that 54,560 bridges were “structurally deficient” in 2017. No doubt someone is arguing at this very minute that that’s a good reason for passing an infrastructure bill, but this number has declined by 60 percent since 1990, falling in every year. For highways, at least, the real need is not an infrastructure bill but to find an alternative user fee to gas taxes, which aren’t indexed to inflation or to increasingly fuel-efficient cars.