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Railway viaducts (built mostly over land):
- Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge
- Tianjin Grand Bridge
- Cangde Grand Bridge
- Weinan Weihe Grand Bridge
- Beijing Grand Bridge
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Not actually long enough to span the channel (excluding access roads etc.):
- Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (main bridge is 30km)
- Jiaozhou Bay Bridge (all three legs combined total 26 km over water)
- Runyang Yangtze River Bridge (total length of two-bridge complex is 7.2 km)
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Could actually span the channel (setting aside differences in water depth and whatnot):
- Hangzhou Bay Bridge
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Not to say all of these projects are not extremely impressive, or that the article doesn't have a point. But making claims like this undermines the author's credibility, at least in my eyes.
But thanks to your comment I now know it was written with an AI and that makes me want to stop here.
If the author is asking an LLM to confirm his biases in order to make his point it will probably contain sycophantic hallucinations.
Britain is broke. That's probably all there is to say.
1. Western politics seems tragically reactionary and concerned with short-term issues. "Boring" stuff like infrastructure maintenance gets set aside. Deferred maintenance results in a superlinear increased expense: deferring $1 of maintenance today will cost you >$1 in the future (in real terms, accounting for inflation).
2. Some nations massively spend on some infrastructure with results little better than others.
> Paris, 15th April 2019, 6:43pm.
> Inside the ancient cathedral all is quiet.
The fire started during the mass, so not fully silent. And a first fire alarm had already been sounded 20 min earlier.
London in general has a terrible problem of car commuters who travel 1-2 hours across the city every day. They're going to take whatever route necessary to do it.
If this is not a failure of Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, then who? Where I grew up, new bridges were paid for by tolls until the building cost was paid then taxes covered occasional maintenance.
Ceteris paribus, building the exact same bridge will result in the exact same failure. Some of the additional cost is precisely to avoid the present scenario repeating itself in the future.
How big that addition represents and how effective it is up for debate, but asking for a better bridge at inflation adjusted price is not a. apples to apples comparison.
Temperature only seems to be an issue because of the now-seized bearings.
Another concern is the loss of a historically listed structure. Most people today prioritize historical structures over any modern structure. Would you be willing to demolish the bridge? You certainly can't rebuild an identical one because we don't have that many expert workers of wrought iron.
It will have been built to older standards. You'll have to convince a lot of people that the weight standards of then, the fire standards of then, and the disaster management standards of then should be exempted from modern controls and in order for them to be exempted you need to create a framework for exemption if it doesn't already exist. Coordination costs a lot of time and money. Even deciding that you don't need coordination for this project requires coordination because without a framework for exempting coordination you can't do it without allowing for always exempting coordination.
You will have seen this in any other realm. The more people have an opinion on something the harder it is to get done. The union of all requirements creates a project that is the intersection of all possibilities enabled, which combined with the classic aphorism about every additional percent taking as much effort as everything before, means that things cost more now.
We can build better and faster when we don't have to listen to anyone. This happens in emergencies. Take a look at the US MacArthur Maze tank truck fire and rebuild.
Very few efficiency improvements have been made in bridge building over the past 150 years aside from prefabricating sections offsite and using hydraulic cranes. Inflation pushes wages higher, making it seem more expensive since there’s no efficiency gain, just higher wages for the workers. It’s good that the people that build bridges and roads and buildings can afford to live.
Preserving a 150 year old bridge gets complicated as it’s virtually bespoke work, problems are uncovered as the project continues, ballooning costs.
Their commute times skyrocketed to go to the next Thames crossing.
It's got nothing to do with anything, it's AI written slop, and the author is farming clickbait topics and articles with no coherent theme or perspective.
If it gets on the HN front page, it gets propagated and an insane level of visibility all over the internet - say, 100 million people see it over the course of 24 hours. If they charge $5 for an annual subscription and 1% (or .1% or even .01%) are so impressed with the content that they sign up, that's a lot of money. I can't find any other possible reason for this showing up, it's nothing to do with tech or AI or silicon valley or the usual weird eclectic stuff that gets discussed, lol.
Kudos to the author for knowing enough about how things work to make such an elegantly targeted campaign, I guess.
There's meat in it, it's not pure slop, but it was definitely fed through the slop factory.
And as some have mentioned, the facts are a bit dubious.
It's cumbersome. Things like "This essay examines two questions." Bold is used wrong. Uniform style wall of text all the way, with identical size sections and everything. Section conclusion not reflecting its title. Looking closely I noticed a couple of other tells but I won't share them in case they are reading.
For example, restoration of a church or school nearby was maybe costing like 5 millions pounds, and will now cost 5.5 millions because construction material, workers, trucks and tractor take that much longer to reach and leave the place having to take deviation now that the bridge is not available anymore.
And now I see it's AI slop. Great.
This isn't April 1st is it? Just contract the Chinese to fix it and it'll be done in a few months.