Hold up, hold up, I'm still trying to calculate the margin here. Whether she was changing it herself, or having the shop do it, may make a difference--what are realistic numbers (I'm not sure where or when $10 would have been appropriate. Just oil? labor?)

But say she spent 5 minutes checking the oil every time she filled up, as she's supposed to. 110 times? that's around nine hours. What if her time was worth $100/hr? I know that we still have to figure in the time she spent when she broke down, but we also have to figure in the time she spent with each oil change.

I don't like this idea of breaking it down to economic particles. At some point, we have to have principles--like, everybody is responsible for their own mess. If you can't do business within those principles, get out of that business.

How long do you suppose she was without her car while the engine was being repaired? Do you suppose it was longer than the number of hours that would've been used having the oil changed? The end result was that deferring the maintenance (in her case out of simple ignorance) ended up costing her about 8 times as much as if she'd performed the maintenance. Neglecting maintenance is a fool's economy.

Cute but it's not necessarily a contradiction. Just because I might vote against any new road, that doesn't mean it is hypocrisy for me to drive on that new road once it's built.

Similarly, I can advocate for higher taxes in a particular funding instance, without paying those all by myself if the proposal is defeated.

End result? I don't see any end result. The example is complicated by a lot of variables. If she has other cars available, then she's not out any time at all while it is being repaired.

Different people have different levels of involvement in the "fool's economy". I clean my gutters myself, I don't expect George W. Bush to clean his. And most of my neighbors don't.

Whereas spending them on keeping the transportation infrastructure in tip-top condition is going to have a very different effect. Almost every business and individual can benefit from a reduced cost to deliver goods and services.

So once again we argue over the correctness of the models and the metaphores we use to describe them. In the mean time there Literally thousands of bridges across this country that are in the same shape as the one in Minnesota and no funds to inspect them or repair them.

So, do we lower them again? Are we at the optimal rate? Or do we increase taxes?

Obviously, lowering rates to zero would result in zero revenues. Raising the rates above zero would increase revenues up to a point. The hard part is identifying where the peak revenue is generated. The fact that lowering the tax rates repeatedly results in increased revenues suggests that we're currently on the downside (past the peak) of the Laffer Curve.

Keep in mind, those that feel we don't pay enough in taxes are free to donate extra if they'd like.

No, they'd rather feel better about themselves by taking more of other people's money. One state, MA if memory serves, formally offered people who wanted to pay more in taxes the opportunity by adding that to their tax forms. Out of a million or so tax returns each year, perhaps 300 people actually paid more taxes than required.

We've heard that for years and years, and we've had few catastrophic failures. People--officials--get complacent.

So once again we argue over the correctness of the models and the metaphores we use to describe them. In the mean time there Literally thousands of bridges across this country that are in the same shape as the one in Minnesota and no funds to inspect them or repair them.

The federal budget alone is approaching $3 TRILLION. Some 2/3rds of that goes to entitlement spending. Add in state and local governments and you'll probably find at least another $1 trillion in government spending. To say that there are no funds to inspect or repair them is simply incorrect. The point is that governments are choosing to spend the money on other things. Politicians would rather attach their names to shiny new pork projects rather than pay for the necessary maintenance of the infrastructure that already exists. The money is certainly there. There is no need to raise taxes but rather to spend the money they get more wisely. As but one example out of thousands, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) pushed through over $250 million last year to build a bridge to an island that has less than 100 residents. How many bridges could've been inspected and repaired with that money?

People get complacent, the way for officials to get elected is to promise to not spend money. If people wanted the infrastructure repaired, they would vote out of office those who weren't doing what they wanted.

Yeah its the government's fault... :rolls eyes:

If people of Minnesota were upset, they could vote the funds to repair the bridges regardless of what Ted Stevens of Arkansas was pushing through congress. They were not interested in doing so... the same is true for the infrasructure nationwide.

People always defend their own representatives and condem those of others. One's voters pork is funding that helps another voter keep their job. Overall the voters enjoy the services they get from government while classifying those that others get as waste. If voters statewide or nationwide wanted the infrastructure fixed they could pressure their representatives to do so with their vites.

Heh, reminds me of an experience I had at my previous job with a transportation contractor.

A new top administrator came in, and the first thing he did was freeze spending so he could go through and review the budget or some crap like that. This was right before we were going to start on a large inventory project for that state. We ended up waiting well over a month before we could get the go-ahead, which in turn forced us to do a rush job in order to get everything done before the deadline. Thanks to some administrator throwing his weight around, the state's DOT ended up getting an inferior product.

The painful irony? It's not like the project we were working on was optional in the first place. It's something that every state is required to complete on a regular schedule in order to get transportation funding from the federal government. So this administrator's "cost-cutting" measure put the state in danger of taking an obscene hit in the pocketbook.

OK, for the record, I think the person who didn't check their oil is stupid. Whether or not they did a complete economic analysis and concluded that they shouldn't.

Yeah its the government's fault... :rolls eyes:

The government had the bridge built to their specifications. The govenment maintained the bridge. Whose else fault could it possibly be but the government's (local, state, and federal)? Someone has to have accountability. Simply blaming the people because they didn't give the government even more money to waste is absurd.

If people didn't like the way the officials were spending their money, they could have gathered together and voted them out of office. Certainly the state of bridges and other infrastructure elements across this country is no state secret. The inspection reports are available and any number of papers have been published about the sorry state of of these structures.

If we as voters don't like it, we can make this a reelection issue and demand action. We don't... we are accountable.

Seems silly to be playing the blame game so hard when nobody's even sure why this bridge collapsed yet.

Yeah... a score of 50 out of a possible 120 on a bridge that performed flawlessly up until this point... its a serious mystery there...

Quite frankly, regardless of the outcome of the investigation, with a score of 50/120 repair and restoration should have been undertaken as soon as the inspection was completed two years ago...

What score is acceptable, in your opinion?

Depends on how much risk you are willing to take. A score in the 80's or 90's would be good. The 70's or high 60's may become a matter of judgment and other factors. After that things get sort grey pretty quickly and you become more and more at risk depending on many imponderable factors. As I said earlier inspection and grading cannot be boiled down to "safe" or "unsafe" they suggest a level of statistical risk. As you get down into the 50's, as has been pointed out in numerous places, it begins to be a matter of structural unsoundness with some coefficient of variation.

But what's the engineering basis for that conclusion? What do words like "structural unsoundness" mean in this context? A layman's initial reaction to a number or understanding of a term that is most likely carefully defined on some rubric doesn't necessarily translate into a good basis for making engineering decisions.

It doesn't translate well, it is, as I said, a basic risk analysis. The question of how much risk is acceptable is a social/political one not an engineering one.

Lets take an example... The interstate highway system was designed to be pretty safe. It could be safer, but to make it safer would have raised the average construction cost per mile of finished highway. In the end, the engineers presented their numbers on expected fatality against estimated cost per mile of finished highway. These were reviewed by elected representatives and community leaders and a compromise was reached between safety and cost.

As I said, I would expect that about 8 or 9 engineers out of 10 who read the inspection report for this bridge would have suggested immediate repair and maintainance two years ago. However, the decision rests with elected representatives not the engineers. I would imagine that someone asked the inspection team if they could guarantee that the bridge would NOT last until the replacement date or just how how bad the risk was. Such things are difficult to quantify. It is easy to say that if something is done the risk is reduced, it is much more difficult to estimate how fast things will go bad.

What was the rate of corrosion in the structural steel members... were the winters expected to be more harsh or less harsh. which would have produced more freeze/thaw cycles... which would have increased the rate of corrosion. How many flaws were detected in the structural members and how many were estimated to have gone undetected. What was he safety factor in the load bearing structural steal how much had this been reduced by the deterioration observed. What was the shift of load in these members as deterioration as a result of the deterioration.

It is not a simple question...

This is a government agency and should therefore be relatively transparent. If a board of engineers did recommend that the bridge be decommissioned or scheduled for immediate repair or replacement but was overruled by administrators, then there should be some record of that event.

That's exactly the point I was trying to make.

It is not an engineer's place to make recomendations. It is their place to present the relative risks associated with different plans. It is upto us and our elected representatives how much risk we want to live with.

That's all I was responding to. If this did happen, an information request should find some reports or memos or something.

They are public record and parts of them have already been news reports. Most news reports do not quote them in detail because they do not make good copy. In fact, they tend to be extremely dense and not amenable to 30 second summaries.



edited to add:

University of Minnesota Study: Fatigue Evaluation of the Deck Truss of Bridge9040.
FRACTURE CRITICAL BRIDGE INSPECTION
Mn/DOT BRIDGE INSPECTION REPORT -- BRIDGE 9340

URS Report Fatigue Evaluation and Redundancy Analysis, July 2006

Part I
Part II
Part III
2007 Supplement

Are you using engineer as a reference to the one who is inspecting?

In Ohio, the bridge inspector has the authority to immedietely close a bridge. Although; I'm sure they would think long and hard about non-engineering repercussions before making that decision.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

If people didn't like the way the officials were spending their money, they could have gathered together and voted them out of office. Certainly the state of bridges and other infrastructure elements across this country is no state secret. The inspection reports are available and any number of papers have been published about the sorry state of of these structures.

You seem to have the naive belief that most of the government is ran by elected politicians. That's far from the case. Most of the government is ran by unelected and largely unaccountable bureaucrats. Even when they screw up (e.g. NASA with Challenger and Columbia), about the worst that ever happens is that they're allowed to retire early. Civil service laws make it very difficult to fire them.

In the case of the bridge collapse, it appears that inspectors noted serious problems for about a decade.

Since the collapse, public attention has focused on consultant reports in 2006 and 2007 that expressed serious reservations about the bridge. But a Star Tribune review of older reports by state inspectors shows that their concerns had been growing since the mid-'90s.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty said on Tuesday that the earliest suggested date for replacement by Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) engineers had been 2020.

Pawlenty defended the decisions made about the bridge.

"At no point did anyone say the bridge needed to be closed, or that there was imminent danger of failure," he said. "If they had, then certainly the commissioner and the MnDOT team certainly would have closed the bridge."We have to rely on the experts," the governor added. "They expressed concerns about the bridge, but at no point, as far as I know, did anyone ever say 'close the bridge.' "

It appears the elected officials took the word of the "experts" at the MnDOT who said the bridge didn't need replacing until 2012. Will any of those "experts" be held accountable? Will pigs fly?

The New York Times (free registration required) tried to make the case that more taxes were needed to pay for the bridge. However, their own article contradicts the assertion with:

Even as the cause of the bridge disaster here remains under investigation, the collapse is changing a lot of minds about spending priorities. It has focused national attention on the crumbling condition of America’s roadways and bridges — and on the financial and political neglect they have received in Washington and many state capitals.

Despite historic highs in transportation spending, the political muscle of lawmakers, rather than dire need, has typically driven where much of the money goes. That has often meant construction of new, politically popular roads and transit projects rather than the mundane work of maintaining the worn-out ones.

Further, transportation and engineering experts said, lawmakers have financed a boom in rail construction that, while politically popular, has resulted in expensive transit systems that are not used by a vast majority of American commuters.

There's plenty of money in the budget to fix the infrastructure. All they have to do is quit spending it so stupidly on pork projects and vanity buildings and instead focus on the real needs. Until they can show they have the ability to spend the money they're already getting wisely, giving them more would be simply foolish.

It seems like there is a lot of discussion as to the feelings of when a bridge goes to far.
But; when I read this one (CNN), I laughed out loud and thought that Gillianren would know what punctuation results in closing a bridge.
Maybe you need a few more top row characters strung together before closing a bridge?

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

It looks like the harrassed public needs an
annual leaflet on the state of local bridges
with an important question answered honestly
by the inspectors. Will you transport
yourselves and your families over this bridge
in its current state? a) yes b) no. And each
years leaflet has covert photographs showing
if the inspectors did use the bridge if they
answered yes the previous year.

I'm not sure if that would solve anything other than getting the public inflamed.

I do like the "would you transport..." way of thinking though. If the answer is no, then close it. Period. (exclaimation?)

The public will quickly understand, and won't need a flier.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)