Lovin’ the interwebs: corrections on comparisons

Back when we started blogging on Johnson Street Bridge DOT org (on the internet, everything moves so quickly and seems old so quickly), I posted Bad Reason #4 (July 28/09). It’s a post I almost (but not quite) regret writing: I felt highly emotionally agitated at the time, and was furious at what continues to look like an ill-conceived scheme by the City of Victoria to replace the Johnson Street Bridge. At the time, I was also agog at what amounted to a general pall of silence around this project – except for the conversation taking place on Vibrant Victoria’s forum, here, here, here, and here. Being a bit shrill in my post – check out the red bolded paragraph header – seemed like a good idea, given what is at stake.

Since then, the conversation has morphed away from how we’re going to lose an irreplaceable heritage artifact, to how we’re going to get into a very nasty financial mess if the City’s plans go ahead. Curiously, that financial focus has actually calmed me down, perhaps because I’m now quite certain I now feel somewhat more sanguine that residents and taxpayers are not going to let the city get away with this.

In turn, today, Vibrant Victoria took me to task for what I wrote in Bad Reason #4: I repeated what I remembered hearing at the April 23 committee meeting, when the Engineering Department and Delcan presented their argument for replacing the Johnson Street Bridge. At the time, their presentation referenced San Francisco’s Fourth Street Bridge, which ran into huge cost overruns. The suggestion, in that presentation, was that  the two bridges are more or less identical, and that therefore the refurbishment costs incurred by the Fourth Street Bridge would predict what we would face if we chose to refurbish the Johnson Street Bridge.

It’s a view echoed by City of Victoria Councilor Pam Madoff, when she replied to a query from Gregory Hartnell:

I looked to San Francisco for some practical advice as I had toured many sites in S. F. after the Loma Prieta earthquake in the early 1990s.

In fact, San Francisco also has a bascule bridge – the 4th Street Bridge (also designed by Joseph Strauss) – which was rehabilitated post-earthquake and I was  optimistic that there would be positive lessons to be learned from the experience.

Unfortunately, as I discovered, this has not been a positive experience.

In order to meet requirements for seismic safety the bridge is now a “faux bascule” with all of the workings, as I understand, now of a hydraulic nature – buried beneath the ground.

The giant counterweights – now non-functioning – were replicated in fibreglass by a contractor who has done work for Disneyland.

The construction costs rose astronomically and the situation is now before the courts.

(There are many websites that tell the tale of the 4th Street Bridge, if you are interested).

This type of faux heritage approach is not something that I would be able to support.

Unfortunately, one cannot underestimate the challenges that are presented by a bascule bridge that is located in an active earthquake zone.

“…San Francisco also has a bascule bridge – the 4th Street Bridge (also designed by Joseph Strauss)…”: but actually, San Francisco has not just a bascule bridge, it has two: the Fourth Street Bridge and the Third (“Lefty O’Doul”) Street Bridge.

And as Vibrant Victoria today reminded me, the Fourth Street Bridge has relatively little in common with the Johnson Street Bridge, particularly in terms of its bascules and counter-weights, while the Third Street Bridge (aka the Lefty O’Doul Bridge) – which typically isn’t invoked in the comparisons to Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge – does.

So now where are we?

Not that much further.

It’s still very difficult to compare apples-to-apples (as Vibrant Victoria’s forum also explains). The Fourth Street Bridge isn’t a good comparison after all – for many reasons. The Third Street Bridge doesn’t have a handy-dandy refurbishment scandal associated with it (as its Fourth Street Bridge cousin does), and therefore isn’t as attractive for those who want to use the Fourth Street Bridge debacle as a disincentive to refurbish the Johnson Street Bridge.

The point remains – despite my previous emotionalism – that, in discussions to evaluate the merits of refurbishing Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge, comparisons to San Francisco’s Fourth Street are more or less irrelevant. It can’t be used to evaluate the merits of refurbishing. What we’re dealing with here is unique, and we need to evaluate it on its own (considerable) merits.

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