How do you learn from a really big mistake?

Walk across it.

Which is why I recently found myself putting on a windbreaker and beginning a long, slow walk across the east span of the Bay Bridge, from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island. This piece of the bridge, completed in 2013, is probably the biggest California mistake of the last generation. The east span was completed a decade late, cost seven times more than official projections, and remains dogged by serious safety concerns.

However, the bridge does have one virtue: It holds lessons for the future, as California faces massive challenges that will necessitate big projects. Indeed, after eight years of the cautious, small-bore governorship of Jerry Brown, new state leaders are preparing to take on big initiatives on infrastructure, taxation, and early childhood.

Before they do, they should read a recently published book I brought on my bridge walk: A Tale of Two Bridges, by Stephen D. Mikesell, a Davis-based historian who previously served as deputy historic preservation officer for the state. Mikesell compares the original 1936 Bay Bridge with the troubled 2013 east span, but his book is really about the special challenges of megaprojects—that is, complex and controversial initiatives costing more than $1 billion.

Today’s cynical conventional wisdom is that big projects are nearly impossible to carry off, and that those that do go forward are destined to fail. But Mikesell argues otherwise. He explains that the original 1936 Bay Bridge met conditions for successful megaprojects.

First, local and state leaders built broad consensus about the purpose and need for the project: constructing a bridge from San Francisco to Oakland was clearly a game-changer for the region in that era. Second, political people made the political decisions about the bridge, and technical people made the technical decisions. While a politically appointed commission approved the bridge and its budget, the details of design and construction were left to technical experts brought in from all over the country. Third, costs were estimated accurately and the bridge came in under budget. And finally, the bridge builders used proven methods for construction and materials, emphasizing functionality rather than trying to make an artistic statement.

The 2013 eastern span didn’t pass all these tests, Mikesell writes. The bridge was a divisive political issue for years. Cost estimates were way off. Technical decisions about bridge design and engineering were made through political processes. And the crucial political decision—to build an expensive new span instead of a less costly retrofit of the old span—was made inside Caltrans. Who were these decisionmaker? Shockingly, Mikesell, a seasoned expert on bridges, writes that the process was so messy it’s impossible to identify exactly who was responsible.

Ultimately, warnings from leading bridge engineers were ignored as Bay Area political leaders chose what they saw as the most visually attractive bridge—a self-anchored suspension bridge—even though this less common design created all sorts of problems.

To walk the span today is to get a firsthand sense of a bridge gone wrong. The walkway itself offers the first clue: It’s on the wrong side of the bridge, the south side, which means that you get a view of the port of Oakland. If the walkway had been on the north-facing side, better views of the north bay, and even the Golden Gate, might have been possible. The walk is also polluted from the passing cars. I was often startled by loud noises from trucks hitting seams on the bridge; the eastbound traffic is so close it feels like it might run you over.

It took me nearly an hour to walk from a small parking lot at the Bay Bridge Trail entry point on Burma Road to the bridge’s signature tower and curve. There is nothing particularly beautiful or interesting about this tower and the cables attached to it. That’s a shame, since this is the section of the bridge that created most of the cost overruns. The tower is also the site of many structural problems, including saltwater intrusion into the foundation, damage to anchor rods, and substandard welds.

The bridge is also a failure because of what it didn’t do. Big projects should be transformational. But this span isn’t. It didn’t increase the bridge capacity or improve traffic flows. It is no artistic masterpiece. Paying for it actually raised bridge tolls. And prominent engineers argue that the new span may be more prone to fail in an earthquake that the old bridge it replaced.

“The 2013 East Bay is notable for how little it actually changed things in the Bay Area,” Mikesell writes.

The bridge was such a fiasco that prominent officials skipped its opening in 2013. It was left to the lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, to handle the ceremonial chain-cutting. In brief remarks, he expressed hope that the bridge would inspire “a generation to dream big dreams and do big things.”

Now that Newsom is becoming governor—and promising big things—perhaps he can turn the bridge into a perverse inspiration by following its essential lessons. Any big project must be truly transformational, providing a service or a connection that truly changes people’s lives. Paradoxically, the execution of such transformations must be intensely practical and risk-averse, emphasizing function over form.

In other words, when you are pursuing a transformational project, achieving the transformation itself must be the sole focus.

How might such lessons be applied? If Newsom wants to build a single-payer health care system, it shouldn’t be the gold-plated model that progressive groups have been advocating for, but rather something simple, cheap and sturdy, covering everyone. He’ll need to resist efforts to make his promised new systems for taxation, homebuilding, and early childhood highly complex with loads of new formulas; the simplest systems are more likely to be durably transformational.

After reaching Yerba Buena Island, I walked around and enjoyed views of Newsom’s city of San Francisco for a few minutes. Tired and sweaty, I called for a Lyft to take me back to Oakland. But no driver would come. So I trudged all the way back, on sore feet, repeating my earlier mistake.

The post Can a Troubled Bridge Show California How to Avoid Big Errors? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Saturday, E3 will be cordoned off by layers of security before undergoing a controlled demolition. The monumental caisson (engineering parlance for an underwater concrete sarcophagus) will be encircled by a curtain of bubbles to dampen the destructive shockwave caused by 600 demolition charges. This will happen in the midst of extreme scrutiny from environmental watchdogs, while convoys of boats measure water quality, marine mammal movements, and underwater acoustics. When the six-second explosion is complete, the last great reminder of the “greatest engineering feat of modern times” will disappear under 50 feet of Bay brine.

We mourn the loss of great works of architecture like Penn Station and decry the wanton destruction by Islamic fundamentalists of Palmyra or the Buddhas of Bamiyan; we know that something beautiful and great has been lost forever. When a bridge is taken down, it rarely makes the papers. Bridges, as some engineers will tell you, have one function: To get you from Point A to Point B, safely and efficiently. Form following function, sometimes without the form.

We should take a minute to mourn the passing of “Old East.” It was a true workingman’s bridge: “It’s rivets, it’s steel. It’s dirty at times. It’s a means to an end, to get by. You’re working and you’ve got to cross this thing, but it’s still looking out for you. It’s taking care of you. … It’s a blue-collar bridge,” said Richard Mooradian, a structural steel welder on the former eastern span for Caltrans, who was interviewed by UC Berkeley historians for the Bay Bridge Oral History Project. In fact, it is—was—comprised of 650,000 pounds of rivets. The 22 million pounds of steel was, at the time, the largest steel order ever placed in the U.S. By the mid-20th century, the rivets and I-beams of the cantilevered Old East were supplanted by high-tension bolts and pre-stressed concrete.

Rivets on Old East

In 2013, just prior to the dismantling of the cantilever structure above Pier E3, I made a night-time journey to photograph the beauty and art in the old eastern span. I crawled up into the girders to photograph a bridge that is far from a quotidian means to an end, but something more transcendent: poetry, a spiritual relic, even somewhat alive. I’ve been exploring the deepest, tallest, and largest manmade structures in the U.S.—from Cold War missile sites, to the highest cranes in San Francisco, to manufacturing facilities for everything from paper to concrete for the past fifteen years. In the rivets of Old East I saw an inherent beauty; combined with the gusset plates, girders, and I-beams, now long gone, they were a vocabulary that many engineers could read like a verse of Shakespeare or passage of E.M. Forster.

And if we imagine engineers as poets, then cantilever bridges like the Eastern Span are the iambic pentameter of civil engineering—common and underappreciated, meant to have a lifespan in the centuries and withstand the heaviest weight loads and winds in the world. Though often denigrated for their erector-set appearance, cantilever spans have survived intact since the 1880s for a reason: None have collapsed due to natural causes.

In February of 1968, a military plane crashed into the cantilever section of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span in heavy fog, leaving only a few blackened and bent pieces of I-beam. Even the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake did not really provoke a “partial bridge collapse.” A deck at Pier E9 succumbed to the 7.1 temblor at an awkward connection between two truss decks—but the cantilever structure itself held strong.

Until its demolition, the Bay Bridge was the world’s most diverse, concentrated collection of bridge types. And it held the title as longest bridge in the world for decades. When the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed steelworker Al Zampa about his favorite bridge in 1986, he replied, “Bay Bridge. Jesus, look at her. Two suspensions end-to-end, six different kinds of bridges, 8 ¼ miles long, deepest piers in the world. We lost 24 men; we dangled up there like monkeys driving shot iron. No net. You fell, that was it. They thought we was all crazy.”

When it was complete, Old East had a spirit and life of its own, sometimes expanding and contracting up to 12 inches due to differences in temperature and load. “Have you ever been on the bridge?” Mooradian rhetorically asked the Berkeley historian. “It has a heartbeat. They all have a heartbeat. They’re all different. They all bounce and move in a different way, and that’s the heartbeat.”

East Bay truss span

The Bay Bridge was also the site of an improbably spiritual awakening that became part of the area’s intellectual history. In 1974, Gary Warne was climbing on the bridge when he had a revelation. “Once I was on the bridge I was greeted by moonlight on still waters and the skyline of the city diminutively reduced to scale on a plywood board, ready for display,” he wrote in his seminal essay “Carnival Cosmology.” “The bridge was obviously a jungle gym made to climb rather than drive over: The cars just using it for the in-between times. … It was then that I was first struck with the feeling that we were here to play, if nothing else, here to play with the world and other people.” That distinctly local exaltation of conscious play became the basis for Warne’s Suicide Club, which was an inspiration for the Cacophony Society and Burning Man, even though Warne himself died in 1983.

In fact, the bridge has been seen in spiritual terms since its opening on November 12, 1936. It was hoped that the bridge would not just join two great cities, East and West, but also unify “the hearts and goodwill of men.” The opening events lasted five full days, and they included 200 planes flying in perfect mass formation; fireworks releasing parachutes with American flags; President Roosevelt activating a switch to signal the procession; the release of a thousand pigeons. The governor of California cut a golden chain with an acetylene torch.

When the final scraps of steel exit the Bay, there will remain just a few pylons of the old causeway at a soon-to-be-created Gateway Park in Oakland. Parts of it—about 1 percent—will be reincarnated as park benches, lamp posts, bus shelters, gazebos, and other public art projects under an agreement with arts organizations in Oakland.

No doubt someday I’ll have feelings for the new bridge, but now it lacks the imprint of time and the memories and ownership that can only come through the rituals of working, reflecting, remembering, and playing. Mooradian knew how he would respond when asked about the new Eastern Span, “I don’t pay attention to it. I just don’t. It’s not mine. I have no thing with it yet.”

The post Mourning the Loss of a True Workingman’s Bridge appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.