The Alaskan Way Viaduct Essay

In 1962, the Bi-State Development Agency (BSDA) asked about the finance the $2 million tram system that transports visitors to and from the top of the Arch (History of Gateway Arch, Paragraph 4). The Gateway Arch’s height 630 foot with stainless steel arch. The Gateway Arch construction began in 1963 and completed in 1965. The monument opened to public on June, 1965. The total cost of the Gateway Arch less

The first completed steel bridge was the Eads Bridge, in St. Louis Missouri. Steel was a very new material and was just starting to become commercially available. Steel was a smart choice to use because it is extremely hard and resists rusting. The Eads Bridge was the longest arch bridge in the world, of 510 feet long. St. Louis became a very important city in the midwest and had to really compete with Chicago during the Civil War. After the Civil War, St. Louis started growing in all directions. “.... the city of St. Louis wanted to reestablish its prewar dominance as the economic powerhouse of the midwest” (Ostrow 75). The main reason to build the Eads Bridge was to connect settlers from the East to the lands of the West. At the time there

Like normal roads, the National Road began to deteriorate over time and because of that, the federal government stopped funding the road and it was abandoned at Vandalia, IL for “political and practical reasons”. Originally the plans called for it to stretch from Baltimore to St. Louis but the rapid growth of railroads led to the project being abandoned. Even though it never quite reached the final goal, it did eventually stretch 800 miles. Now, present day National Road is now part of U.S. Route 40. Roads today are either under construction or in need of construction. In the year 1811, Washington and Jefferson advocated on the idea to aid western expansion, so work on the “National Road” or “Cumberland Road”. This is the first road that was surveyed by Congress in 1806-7 and built from 1811-37. This road branched from the Cumberland, MD. In order to create this massive road, it had to under very crucial

One of the few people that were going to fully push for this project would be William Tweed, a New York politician that was said to have a hand in every creek and crevice of business in the area of New York both legal and otherwise. Tweed began his career in 1851 by going from a simple fireman into an alderman and from then on he found that he no longer had to depend on honest work from then on and by 1869 or the time when the bridge would start to be build and the same year that its very own author of the great bridge would sacrifice his life for the sake of both his own pride and according to some accounts, the bridge’s success. By 1869, he was reaching the pinnacle of his influence as he was in his prime and doing everything that he set his mind to and this was when he would become the “Boss” of New York and from then on become known as Boss Tweed and he might as well been since judges made decisions based on his request, legislators passed or opposed laws at his will, and both the Mayor and Governor were in his pockets and were at his beck call. This was the Tweed Machine and it controlled every aspect of politics and was the epicenter

The Rancho el Pescadero survey (1861) and patent (1865) brought changes to the West Side Road. The grant’s proprietors, eager to evict squatters from their land, erected a fourteen-mile fence along the rancho’s freshly surveyed borders in 1866. Once Generals Frémont and Naglee enclosed the grant, the stage road traced the angled seam between the two Rancho el Pescadero land grants. Travelers have used this alignment continuously—calling it the Stockton–Oakland Stage Road, Banta Road, the West Side Road, the LINCOLN HIGHWAY, US HIGHWAY 50, and INTERSTATE 5—for over 150 years.

The railroad had to gain over 4,000 ft in just 50 miles with a grade of no more than 2-percent, a challenge for Chief Engineer H.A. Sumner. He laid out a very efficient route to gain such altitude, parts of which are still used today, such as the Little and Big Ten Curve. Following the Front Range Foothills, the line snaked west just south of Boulder, near Eldorado Springs. To reach the village of Tolland, 40 miles west of Denver, 33 tunnels were bored. However, the struggles of building the line west were not over

In conclusion the Alaska Highway was the second major engineer project every completed by U.S. Army engineers. After long debates on what route to select for the highway one route was selected that connected several small airports and the construction started because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The soldiers faced sever adversity and overcame everything from, poor clothing, to fighting muskeg and permafrost, to learning new bridging techniques that prevented frost jacking. As a result Alaska was finally connected to the lower 48

Therefore, from this point, the tracks would then be built over the land for a particular distance

The Tunnel rested above the preexisting, subterranean subway line. These steel tunnel sections were assembled in Baltimore, Maryland, over 650 kilometers away from Boston, and then transported by boat (Hall, 2006).

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 pushed for transcontinental highways across America to connect the nation in a safer fashion. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law to improve “speedy, safe transcontinental travel” through a 40,000 mile interstate highway. Since the Cold War pressured Americans into building the highways, support for their construction grew as they provided quick evacuation routes for cities that could be target areas from the impending threat of the Soviet Union. The Act provided that the federal government would pay 90 percent of the cost for building the highway and the law portioned out $26 billion to pay for the construction. The government collected the money for the construction by increasing the

The Gateway Arch was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in 1947. Construction began on February 12, 1963, and was completed on October 28, 1965, for $13 million (equivalent to $190 million in 2015). The monument opened to the public on June 10,

The current Bay Bridge spans across the San Francisco Bay and through Yerba Buena Island. The reason the bridge travels through an island is because in the 1930’s it would have been nearly impossible to construct an eight mile long bridge spanning such deep water. During most of the 20th century, this island was a U.S. Navy base and in order for construction to be allowed, the approval of Congress was necessary. As a result, there was a great deal of lobbying that occurred in order to allow California the right to build across the island. After gaining the approval of Congress in February of 1931, construction started in July of 1933.

The basic design of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge itself was a suspension bridge with a center span of 2800 feet and two side spans of one 1100 feet (Farquharson, 1950, p. 17). Its two lane, reinforced concrete roadway was twenty-six feet wide with two 5 foot, 9 inch sidewalks (Farquharson, 1950, p. 19). Overall the superstructure was 5939 feet, including the suspension structures, approach spans and anchorages (Farquharson, 1950, p. 19). Anchorages were made of solid concrete and were fifty feet by 170 feet and were fifty feet high (Farquharson, 1950, p. 19). The main towers which the cables saddle were 425 feet in height and with a spacing of thirty-nine feet at the top and fifty feet at the bottom (Farquharson, 1950, p. 19). Each cable consisted of nineteen strands of galvanized wire and totaled a diameter of seventeen inches. The design of the bridge may sound rather large and structurally stable but as mentioned before the bridge was designed to be very sleek looking. By

Our transportation system, quite arguably, may embody our most vital system, as Infrastructure and Democracy clarifies, “access is the hallmark of a great infrastructure” (Jones, Reinecke). By great contrast, our roads remain a current issue. 42 percent of America’s urban highways remain congested, costing the United States 101 billion dollars in wasted time and fuel each year. Also, the32 percent of roads, in poor or mediocre condition, cost the average traveler $324 per year (American Infrastructure Report Card). Unfortunately, updating the highway systems seems longer than it may seem, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that from proposal to completion most highways will need nine to nineteen years to fix (Leduc, Wilson 129). In addition to the roads, our bridges are failing just as much. One of every nine bridges within the United States is categorized as structurally deficient. The average bridge 42 years old, and in order to eliminate the bridge renovation backlog, our country would need to invest twenty and a half billion dollars until 2028 (American Infrastructure Report Card). However, in 2013, the United States only invested 12.8 billion dollars in bridge reconstruction and repair (American Infrastructure Report Card). Also, our countries transit

“The project was halted in 1963: some fifty miles of road was eventually built, but no bridges were ever erected over the many rivers it transected, and the route was shortly rendered impassable by thawing permafrost and seasonal floods. Yutan hauled two of the buses back to the highway. The third bus was left about halfway out the trail to serve as a backcountry shelter for hunters and trappers” (Krakauer 10).