@ConnorC Yeah, @samth points out on Birdsite that the reason Hampton Roads has tunnels and not bridges is defense - bridges can be destroyed by enemy action and this would block access to the naval port. Same reason used to force the construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel when Moses preferred a bridge.
@Iragersh@Alon also because drivers need a view -- this is why he refused to build a lower, cheaper Henry Hudson bridge that would have saved Inwood Hill Park, Van Cortland Park, and the village of Spuyten Duyvil. You can't enter a great city like a rat, scurrying underground! He really said that.
Also recall that NY only has a tunnel because Roosevelt was convinced that a bridge would be a security threat to the Navy Yard
@Iragersh@Alon i can't find it. Might have been my memory playing tricks
Gotta go search on a digital version, though THERE IS NO DIGITAL VERSION
ps i am almost done copying my copy of the audiobook to non DRM MP3 files. Such a relief to be able to listen in the player of my choice. Even one that works! (Unlike the Kobo app lately, which fails to play books but sends thousands of tracking beacons back to its real masters)
@stevenbodzin@Iragersh The "scuttling like a rat" reference is Vincent Scully re the new Penn Station - or was it something Moses had said previously about road tunnels too?
@stevenbodzin@Iragersh@Alon
I can’t remember if there is a passage in the book, but Inwood neighborhood lore is that he waited until an early holiday morning to destroy Inwood Hill Park because the neighborhoods of Inwood and Spuyten Duyvil were actively protesting it.
At least there are two places to cross to the other side of the highway.
But the noise and chaos of a highway in an otherwise place of refuge is 💩
@atthenius@stevenbodzin@Iragersh@Alon There are a couple of places in the book where does similar things. He even brags about it, how he manages to get projects done by tricking people and then having his workers rip stuff up before they can be stopped.
@Alon (American highway engineers had, until recently, an unjustified aversion to cable-stayed bridges, which would be more resilient and easier to construct than a giant truss like the collapsed Key Bridge main span, but the public is also overly sentimental so I wouldn't be surprised to see them try to copy the old design but with piers farther removed from the edges of the shipping channel.)
@Alon I do not know. It seems silly, considering how many were built in Europe during the immediate post-war reconstruction, but US engineers basically did not consider them until the 1980s. The Clark Bridge (1994, IL-MO) is the best known of the new cable-stayed bridges and the first really significant one; its construction was featured in a mid-90s NOVA episode, "Super Bridge". The Zakim Bridge in Boston was being designed about the same time.
@capntransit It's that or a bridge. When it's a new crossing, note that even with German tunneling costs and an enormous anti-Green backlash, the 17th section of A100 may not happen because it's a new road extension in a city that doesn't need them at a cost that isn't easy to fund.
Add comment