Yes, it is something that should be done, and yes, it won't be easy. Your comment reflected absolutely none of that, and even was arguing against me saying that it would be extremely difficult, so it did in fact seem like you were saying that this is a simple fix. Heck, you didn't even say "figure out how many bridges you can afford," but simply "remove 150 of them."
Oh yeah, just knocking down 150 bridges is a very easy decision that's going to go over extremely well with the local population, certainly not political suicide as well as a massive, expensive project in its own right. It's not like all those bridges existed for good reason, and just getting rid of them wouldn't have massive impact on an extremely large number of things about the city.
They absolutely need better maintenance. It's been a safety hazard for most of my life. But the solutions are not easy.
So, what do you propose? Knocking them down? Put fences? Which are you going to do that on? Are you going to fend off all the people using those bridges for destroying their commute? None of those options are cheap either. Even selecting the bridges to keep/not keep takes time and effort and thus money.
That's fair. I do also agree that it seems obvious, but given the number of the people in this thread and elsewhere suggesting that fixing it would just simply be so easy, it doesn't seem like that's the case for many others.
I didn't read the OP as saying "nowhere else has infrastructure problems" but "bridges are a particularly acute problem in Pittsburgh for these reasons." I would certainly agree that suggesting this kind of issue is unique to Pittsburgh would be misguided.
Phase it. You don't have to nominate every bridge and start simultaneously. Like you say. Choose a few, remove those, then re-evaluate what traffic looks like now.
The problem isn't that it's particularly hard or risky to dismantle the bridge. It's that this specific bridge is an industrial monument that holds a special place in many people's hearts and after the last restoration in 2017 a pledge was made that the bridge would never be dismantled or otherwise harmed again.
Then along comes Mr. Rich Man with his exorbitant needs and suddenly these promises have all become worthless. It's a matter of principle; people are fed up that the rules never seem to apply to the super rich and everything and everyone has to make way for their demands.
The devil is in the details. What's "an organized way" if not "committees and referendums"? Even just the traffic impact studies alone to figure out what would happen when taking out each bridge, let alone that very often they'd impact each other and so you'd also need to figure out what happens with traffic for combinations of bridges, seems like a daunting and expensive task to me.
Is installing a steel beam 10-30 feet before the bridge on either side that difficult?
For a layman that seems like a simple fix to deal with drivers who cannot read the signs. Shift the damage away from the bridge.
Does someone in the town administration make loads of money whenever the bridge is hit and a repair contract is handed out to their brother-in-law's firm?
That is just a misallocation of funds, not a lack of budget. I think the federal government can find a way to fix bridges with a 4 Trillion dollar budget.
Oh nonsense. It's not like you can just come along and set up another bridge; that takes years, and the incumbent is likely to leverage some of the economic rents to frustrating your purpose.
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