Road Constructions: Minnesota Road Collapse

When an individual has lived in and around an area such as New Orleans, La, the majority of their lives, it is hard to imagine an area with roads that are just as bad as, if not worse, as those in the city of New Orleans. With countless potholes, crumbling pavement and sink holes popping up here and there, there is no way the streets could be that bad anywhere else. That is the mentality that one has until the venture out to other cities such as Toledo. According to an article published in the Toledo Blade on June 19,2015 by Tom Troy, Toledo’s roads are the second worst in the state of Ohio. With the poor road conditions and constant road constructions, comes a number of problems for the city’s residents. People are forced to spend countless

With the constrained scenario, traffic flow has improved, commute time has decreased, workers are getting to their places of business faster, and the businesses themselves are finding that they can transport their goods in a more timely fashion. The measures that were employed consist of adding directional bike lanes to the bridge, restriping the bridge combined with timed directional transition of the middle 5th lane, additional bus routes, and converting old buildings into domiciles. Although these measures have helped to improve traffic flow in the region, capital will have to be spent at a future date in order to add additional

America has 5,540 deficient bridges alone, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Infrastructure Report Card. Every four years, ASCE provides America with an assessment including recommendations, condition, and needs for the nation’s infrastructure. In a basic A-F format, the Report Card is graded in eight main categories: capacity, condition, funding, future need, operation and maintenance, public safety, resilience, and innovation. This report card, since 1998, has given the nation a steady D, only rising to a D+ in the 2013 report. The Report states that there is a need of 3.6 trillion dollars in investments by 2020 to raise the grade up to a B. Funding America’s infrastructure is of major controversy and debate. Starting

Wald is a reporter for New York Times. He mentioned the reason for why the interstate 35W bridge would collapse into the Mississippi River was because there was a mistake in the bridge’s design. The reason was that there were few metal plates were too thin to be a junction of the bridge. So, these weak junctions caused the collapsed of the 35W bridge and let to 13 people killed during this accident. The Interstate 35W bridge had been existed for over 40 years after it was constructed in 1960s. After a long period of time, the bridge began to have weak points and require frequently repair for the bridge to make it safe. However, the changes made in the bridge made the bridge even weaker. After the bridge was collapsed into the Mississippi River, the National Transportation Safety Board held a conference to discuss the investigation about the cause of the bridge collapsed. Mostly, the investigators would

One of the most important proponents of Good Roads, Manhattan Mayor Schnieder commented, "we must plan additional facilities and build practicable roads for the exclusive use of the wheel … in our parks and elsewhere" Mayor Schnieder was behind the construction of good quality roads for those using wheels throughout the city and city venues. This is just the start of the Good Road's movement (1).

On the first evening of August about 6:05 pm on the eight-lane bridge of I-35W highway the bridge collapse. The I-35W bridge is located over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, state of Minnesota.

A word has started to appear in discussions of driving. The word is "distracted." It refers to drivers who pay more attention to their cell phones, or their text messages, than they do to driving. The results can be fatal. One of the most common distractions today is texting. Each day in the United States, 9 people are killed and more than 1,060 people are injured in crashes that are reported to involve a distracted driver (Center). A couple of months ago, I and a friend were sitting at a red light waiting on green. We were talking about making plans for later that evening. We decided what to do as soon as the light turned green, we waited on the car in front of us to ease off the line. Then we were hit. This turned into a five car pileup.

Majority of America’s roads and bridges were built for an earlier time and are now in poor condition (Petroski, 2016, pg. 9). Infrastructure is created with a design life that usually tends to be around fifty years (St. Martin, 2017). That timeframe though includes regular routine maintenance and while some components may last longer, each one will eventually reach a breaking point. Fifty years for many of America’s structures has come and gone, and within those fifty years no maintenance was completed. This is the one of the leading causes of the aging infrastructure that America is plagued with; structures reach their design life and become outdated before we can replace them. As an ever increasing nation, we are ever expanding but this

Construction will encounter further delays due to the precautions that need to be taken to ensure the safety of workers and travellers while work is completed on the busy highway. These delays add to the already significant financial cost of implementing these ideas for widening and improving the existing highway. The economic cost associated with the different proposed options of development for the highway range from an “estimated 200 million dollars to 1billion dollars” (Transportation). The cheapest option includes upgrades to only a “total of 18.8 km” (Transportation)of road, and does not allow for a “alternate emergency route, as well as still maintaining an inadequate capacity rate and limited improvements over all” (Transportation). There are several different options that fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes both in cost and improvement outcomes. These options vary in estimated costs of 300 million -600 million dollars and would improve anywhere from 19.1km-26.2 km of the current highway. (Transportation) These proposed options have a range of different outcomes, the majority do not fully address all of the issues and the ones that do, do so with “significant

The Millau Viaduct was built for the one purpose of reducing congestion in the Millau region. Before the bridge was built, motorists would have to drive though the winding country roads through the town of Millau and the Tarn valley, causing traffic jams backing up over ten miles, especially during the holiday season. It could take motorists driving across this valley, which is only a bit over 2km wide, from 30 minutes to 4 hours to cross. With this new extension of the AutoRoute, the Millau Viaduct, travellers now only take a couple of minutes to cross the valley, and they still have a chance to see and admire the beautiful landscape.

As lightly mentioned before the effects of aging infrastructure proves to be unethical in many ways. It proves to have effects on quality of life, the safety of citizens, and America’s economic well-being. The number one goal of engineers should be to protect the safety, health, and welfare of the public; but one could ask that with these results that we face, is this really being accomplished? By “seeing virtually all infrastructure categories receiving mediocre and poor grades in the C and D range since the late 1990s, [we] cannot help but wonder why our nation has not redoubled its efforts to improve our roads and bridges and by implication the rest of our infrastructure over that period” (Petroski, 2016, pg. 25). Infrastructure is facing severe damage due to the lack of attention America has given it. Unaddressed issues lead to the deficiency of infrastructure and, at a certain point, danger ensues (St. Martin, 2017). Roadways are littered with potholes that interrupt traffic and cause serious injury to vehicles; conditions have become so deteriorated that the frequency of accidents increases as their status gets worse. Bridges carry heavy loads for decades and receive no maintenance, resulting in fatigue and cracking that lead is likely to lead to ultimate failure. Infrastructure, in cases like these, can be counterproductive because of the hazards they pose to the population as they don’t function properly” (Petroski, 2016, pg. 18).

The bridges are being eroded as well, thereby making movement of vehicles for both private and commercial purposes in effective with adverse effects on the National domestic revenues and depopulation

Road congestion impacts the economic production of a city. The Kwinana Freeway Widening Project constructs additional two lanes southbound to keep up with the traffic flow during peak hour period. The Kwinana Freeway Widening Project shows that urban procurement strategies have been conducted to achieve consistency, safety, accuracy and efficiency during construction work. Additional items are considered during planning for this project such as utilities, traffic, property access, surveying, and local authority and residents. For earthworks on the widening project, systematic approaches have been incorporated to increase time and cost efficiency. Material management have also been included in the widening project, as segregation and

Only 50% of the roads are paved, even the paved length has inadequate design standards. The current state of our nation’s transportation infrastructure is inadequate, and many state and city municipalities do not have the funds to rehabilitate their road networks to improve them to an acceptable level. National Highways Authority of India has prepared plans involving an outlay of Rs. 2,20,000 crores under National Highways Development Program (NHDP) and 10,000 km of expressways at a cost of Rs 1,00,000 crores are being planned in order to develop the road infrastructure and to boost the economy in India. The eleventh plan investment in roads and bridges is about Rs 2, 78,658 crores which is about 13.57 % of total outlay.

*The current redoubt road and mill road is will not be useful for road users by any transportations and pedestrians. Problems such as: