It took a year to build the Empire State Building, and 5 years to build the Hoover Dam yet current estimates for the Francis Scott Key bridge rebuild are near 10 years. Why is this? Have we regressed?
In: Engineering
Well, 50+ years ago they also started building the Francis Scott Key bridge, and that took around 9 years from initial funding to actually opening the bridge (and not counting a lot of the planning that went into it earlier in the 60s).
So we know 50 years ago they wouldn’t have done it faster because they *didn’t* build it faster. Different kinds of projects have different timelines of course, and if you’re willing to throw tons of money to getting it done quickly and/or disregard safety and environmental considerations, you can certainly build things faster.
That being said, from what I’ve seen the 10 year “estimate” isn’t really an actual estimate. My understanding is that was basically a quote lamenting the fact that some public works projects do take a long time now, and wasn’t specific to the rebuilding of the bridge. I doubt it takes that long, but it’s early yet to have very specific timelines. There’s a lot they could do to upgrade the new bridge, and, depending on what it is, that could add time to the rebuild. A lot of what takes a while with big projects though is regulatory and has to do with the land acquisition. But the government already owns the land, and regulatory bodies can be made to move faster on projects like this, particularly when we already did a lot of the legwork for the original bridge.
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