Towering span over Rouge River is falling apart as state crosses fingers

[Jimaz]

... My main interest was how it could be number 1. I find it difficult to believe that bridge has 146,000 crossings, or even a 10th of that number....

This appears to have been old guy's source from American Road & Transportation Builders Association:

State Bridge Profile — Michigan

Maybe that will help.

[[Oops, I didn't break up the rightmost column. )

[gumby]

Sorry, yes of course, I should have looked ^that up. My main interest was how it could be number 1. I find it difficult to believe that bridge has 146,000 crossings, or even a 10th of that number. It is only lightly used and hardly at all on weekends and when WSU is not in class. In fact I question if that many even pass under it. Am I missing something?

Maybe it is a combination of the two, those who pass over and under it.

[Wesley Mouch]

Maybe it is a combination of the two, those who pass over and under it.

Seems like counting both makes sense. After all, isnt' that what a bridge does. Let's people pass over and under?

If you didn't count both then most every adjacent bridge would have identical counts.

[gumby]

Seems like counting both makes sense. After all, isnt' that what a bridge does. Let's people pass over and under?

If you didn't count both then most every adjacent bridge would have identical counts.

Plus those passing under it are just as affected by a catastrophic failure as those passing over it.

[Wesley Mouch]

Plus those passing under it are just as affected by a catastrophic failure as those passing over it.

And the freeway would be just as closed.

Unlike the I75 bridge, this has a simple re-routing [[either Davison or Fisher). I75 failure would be more difficult to deal with. Both no picnic.

[ABetterDetroit]

That photo of the plywood or whatever on the bridge is something I've never seen before.[/QUOTE]

Actually it's a common band aid for overpasses that are scaling concrete. When someone else is driving just look up when you go under, it will not take long to spot the plywood.

It is shameful that politicians in Washington and Lansing have continuously kicked this can down the road for way to long now. Good infrastructure is critical to a healthy economy not to mention that people get killed when its neglected.

[the rock]

Perhaps someone's memory is better than mine, but as I remember it, wasn't there a bunch of reconstruction of this bridge in the late 80s or early 90s?

Who was the engineer who was on a panel and who concluded that a tunnel under the River was the better option, much more costly at the offset, but given the expensive on-going maintenance required for a bridge, would make a tunnel the way to go?

[RO_Resident]

Maybe it is a combination of the two, those who pass over and under it.

No, more likely just a mundane miscoded database entry. They may have swapped the "on" and "over" for the bridge. If they used aggregated numbers, you would get some crazy results at freeway interchanges.

It looks crazy to us because it is so obviously talking about the bridge carrying the wrong traffic. The road being an urban minor arterial should have raised a red flag on their end, though.