New Bridges Rise in New York
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I finished the Audible recording a few months ago, and it lived up to its reputation as perhaps the great modern biography.
Also, don't you want to know how his reign eventually met its end?
Driving there is nightmare.
[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7375669,-73.8506027,3a,75y,7...
[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7316156,-73.8699642,3a,75y,3...
This is exactly what's happening in Bayonne across the river. The turnpike -> toll -> residential route (and reverse) to the shipping port creates an extreme amount of congestion - the worst I've seen in NJ. For the past few years they've been building a dedicated turnpike lane, toll booth, and road to the port along with a set schedule based on plate numbers for trucks to be received.
I'm cautiously optimistic that the construction will help, but the big issue is that as long as trucks are sharing the road, traffic will be much worse.
Law enforcement and politicians really need to pay more attention to how dangerous or careless some truck drivers are. It gets old having to literally and figuratively hold your breath every time you get stuck near a truck.
[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7292844,-73.8393884,1040a,35...
* I am not used to Waze UI I often missed my exit or turns..
* Waze often has a delay telling me when to turn (very often I get a turn signal just 100 feet away).
So my plan these days is use Google Map as always, but study the direction, try to learn the road, and optimize on my own if I need to repeat the trip again. My dad says a good driver needs to know how major road works. Years ago GPS wasn't a thing and people got by without problems. Last year's Labor Day weekend I spent the holiday with my friends in Lake George. On the third day I had zero cellular connectivity most of the time on the road, but lucky me I already learned the road (since we have been driving in and out the place multiple times during the day), I was able to get by with little problem.
It will say "Take a left on Main St." then think for a little while, and then beep because it needs to reroute you.
It's really annoying, because it means you need to look at your screen in order to figure out exactly where you are going. Google Mpas gives much, much, much better verbal instructions. I know WAZE doesn't have as much information on every given road as Google, but it isn't difficult to figure out if the next instruction is going to be given too late.
That's not really my experience. At least some subset of the time Google Maps seems to get it into its head that what it would really like to do is take a nice country drive that involves making turns every half-mile or less. I can't comment on how frequently it does this relative to other applications, but Google will definitely sometimes take you on a very convoluted route to ostensibly save 3 minutes.
I had that experience sometimes, but perhaps places i visit happen to have main road around. There are times I look at the GMap and just goes smh telling myself I know a better route than Google does, and I am right many times. Now I have driven for two years, I actually enjoy driving and figuring out how to get to a destination.
I hate the fact that I have to look at WAZE while I'm driving. I drive in Chicago, and you need to basically keep your eyes on the road at all times, because people are flying in from all directions. I trust drunk drivers more than I trust people who look at their phone when they drive, because at least drunk drivers are looking at the road.
Maybe at some point in the future there will be a universal app.
Literally, any time of day or night could be an epic traffic snarl. The worst was when I was stuck on a school bus in the 80s for 4 hours on our way back from a field trip when Gorbachev was speaking at the UN.
That's a 1930s idea. GM's Motorama at the 1939 World's Fair had it. Dividing wide roads into narrower sections was once considered a good thing, but it's not helpful in practice. Getting around accidents becomes harder, and so does getting emergency vehicles close to the trouble spot. Lane closures for maintenance become tougher.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/popular-cable-sta...
I live with a view of the bridges, it has been fascinating watching them construct the new bridge.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Road_Bridge
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-32...
In fact, it is designed with enough redundancy that if lightning or an accident takes out 2 (maybe 3 , can't remember) of the cables, the bridge will still stand.
So unless it is a very long gap that needs to be spanned like Golden Gate Strait or the Strait of Messina, which would require a suspension bridge , the cable stayed type will be the "go to bridge"
Source: personal experience. I have built 2 such bridges before. Led the planning and installation of the actual stay cables. I know all about it :-).
Had to make a lot of the jigs ourselves. Lots of room for innovation and automation ;-)
Any chance we can talk about your work, and perhaps specifically about the room for innovation and automation?
What about buckling though? With all that force from the cables pulling the bridge deck toward the towers, it seems like a bit of unexpected bending or weakness (breeze, earthquake, minor damage) could cause the deck to travel inward to the tower while being crushed.
I do have to agree that I am tired of cable-stay bridges. They are a distant third for looks, behind suspension and obviously the stone arch. More stone arches please! Do a big one, a mile or two in height.
Actually there is very little stress on the cables. The cables are stressed just enough to take the sag out of em. i.e. All the cables are actually supporting is their self weight! All you need is a hand-held jack and a lot of clever math, to install them :-).
The deck on one side of the tower is held in place by counter weight of the deck on the other side.
About earthquakes, it's designed for those 100 year quakes, hurricanes and floods. When we were building the Audubon Bridge across the Mississippi River, we were in fact hit by a 100-year flood and 2 hurricanes. Other than some stored material floating away and having to watch out for alligators in odd places. We got through fine :-)
The bridge type is rarely chosen for beauty :-) especially when contractors have to bid competitively for tonget a chance to build them. Governing factors are technical feasibility (design and constructability) and cost.
https://static.noticiasaominuto.com/stockimages/1370x587/nao...
https://www.google.com.br/search?q=ponte+estaiada+s%C3%A3o+p...
http://www.fosterandpartners.com/media/Projects/1158/img3.jp...
> What is the difference between the cable-stayed bridge and a suspension bridge?
Complete with pretty graphics.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-the-cab...
And yet, in so many movies, bridges in NYC are filled with people and/or military vehicles going one way or another. I wonder if they were tasked with actually making sure the bridges could support a city evacuation or massive protest.
“It was probably the biggest load the bridge had ever seen,” said Mark Ketchum, a San Francisco bridge engineer who studied the Golden Gate Bridge from 1989 to 1991. “But it did not exceed the design load capacity of the bridge.”
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2012/05/23/the-day-the-golden-gat...
Even the Brooklyn bridge, partially because structural mechanics wasn't quite as well developed at the time, has a factor of safety of 6.
Bridges are designed and built with enough redundancy that if you fit all the people you can find on them, they can comfortably handle the weight. One should be more worried about not how many folks are there but HOW they are moving. Remember if you are in a protest and on a bridge don't "walk in step" like this https://goo.gl/dXIvBN . If you are interested in why this happened watch this https://goo.gl/ZOlzyx (skip to 2:42)
Forget the modern concrete and steel ones, when we built small bridges for villagers in Rwanda and Central America, we would ask all the villagers and their horses to come and fill them (just like in the protest pictures). This is basically done to address the concerns of some folks like you who may have to see it to believe it :-) See picture here: https://goo.gl/RIixT0
Source: Personal experience being a construction engineer who has built cable stayed bridges and the ones in the picture.
Vancouver has been dealing with this for a little while now, and NYC gets a heck of a lot more snow...
http://globalnews.ca/news/3108176/windshields-shattered-afte...
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2017/04/mackinac_bridge_...
Pronounciation help needed.
I suppose an engineer would have more input on this though, I really don't know too much about bridge design.
Of course I only recognize these tells because of New York's place in modern media, the setting of so much TV situational humour that street names are household words worldwide. More feet may be shot in Vancouver or LA, but everything is still set in NY.
"Of course, this isn’t an exact science — different article in The New York Times even list slightly different pronunciation guides, and different native speakers pronounce words differently. In the Bronx, the streets are lined with tricky titles, including Lyvere Street, Lowerre Place, Fteley Avenue and Schieffelin Avenue."
https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/pronouncing-th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_streets_in_N...
It's a thing. That natives don't see it only makes it more a thing.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Pl-Tadeu...
Go figure.
The 401 and QEW are a disaster though, I agree. Mississauga and the rest of the Western GTA sprawl are the worst-case example of how induced demand can ruin a roadway.
Hopefully some events tip the political scales, as the open hostility of the Federal government will cause irreparable harm.
Maintaining things like school districts, towns, villages and special districts will always be local priorities that always win against regional initiatives. You probably have 50 police departments alone just on Long Island, with at least 50 collective bargaining agreements that would need to be consolidated and dealt with. That's 50 police chiefs who need jobs, and thousands of generously paid policemen who would need to integrate with a larger and less generously paid NYPD. You'd have the same situation with school districts.
The formation of "Greater New York" (New York City) was only possible in the 1890s because the political machinery was in place to allow annexation and takeover to be effective. Tammany Hall was more powerful than the opposition. State administrations in New York have been trying to encourage consolidation and shared services for decades with very limited success. Even dying places in Upstate New York want to hold on to local autonomy.
The single tunnel shared by Amtrak and NJ Transit trains is 100% full of trains which are over 100% full at peak.
So yes, PATH and other trains are extremely useful.
Whereas Manhattan subways have two tracks per tube, the PATH has only one. Service is not only slower, but you usually wait significantly longer just sitting on the PATH before it even leaves the station.
Hurricane Sandy also did irreparable damage to the tunnels crossing the Hudson.
I believe you are correct about the tracks through the cross river tubes, but less traffic makes it easier to incorporate in NYCTA, not harder.
They talked about running PATH trains up the rest of the 6th Ave trunk in the early Aughts, but it fell apart due to political dysfunction (shocking).
The cross-harbor tunnels are cast iron, and are not straight.
The PATH and NYCT systems are incompatible. I think they use the same track gauges, but NYCT cars (either division) are too long to navigate some of the curves on PATH.
The effects political dysfunction are really starting to materialize now. Penn Station, North River Tunnels, PATH tunnels are all in really critical states now.
As far as I know, there's no reasonable way to bike between middle/lower Manhattan and New Jersey. A new tunnel / bridge should definitely add some bike lanes!
This is known as The Gateway Project[1], has been in progress for many years and with many years and billions left to go, and was listed in Trump's "top 50" infrastructure plan.
It's a long distance. The GW Bridge was seen as a "world wonder" level engineering achievement when it was constructed.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_Program_(Northeast_Cor...
http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2009/06/29/why-they-named-t...
I love crossing the bridge at night (it lights up). It's a shame I'm not in Boston much and the traffic flow usually takes me under it or around it.
It's a lot to ask for. But it would be so worth it.
Let's encourage people to bang on bridges with sledgehammers
totally worth it
If it is possible, someone will eventually do it.
But the sledgehammer thing is likely insignificant compared with a fully-loaded dump truck crashing into any particular piece of your bridge. So I trust the competence of the engineers that design suspension or cable-stayed highway bridges to the point that I would not worry about someone--or 88 different someones--trying to play one of those bridges like a piano.
Or at least I wouldn't worry about the structural integrity of the bridge. I might worry about the quality of the "music".
This exists:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a2...
There are a few of them:
When you release the external load the concrete is under tremendous compression, and is able to easily resist tension.
Car culture needs to die in a nuclear fire.