www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/02/23/ED54484.DTL
And, as it turns out, shaky foundations can undermine bridge design processes, too. For 2 1/2 years, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Caltrans attempted to shore up a flawed process for picking a design for a new eastern span of the Bay Bridge. Design selection was not about the best conceptual design but about who was going to get the contract for the design. In late April 1997, with less than two weeks' notice, MTC announced a competition for bridge-design concepts. The authors of this article were invited to participate. During three days of presentations, MTC's Engineering and Design Advisory Panel sat in judgment of a dozen proposals, including -- incredibly -- those of some of its own members, representatives of firms that routinely receive contracts from Caltrans. On the second day, panel members were asked by the chairman -- after he was handed a note -- to indicate who among them were submitting proposals for their own consideration. Several raised their hands, raising eyebrows among astonished onlookers. To those of us invited to submit proposals, who did not have sponsors on the jury and who were not told that the jury would be our competitors, this was a simple act of fraud. MTC's Steve Heminger explained feebly that the bridge design community was not large enough to produce a jury and a pool of qualified designers. The panel proceed ed to summarily eliminate every proposal not associated with its own members. MTC anticipated a two-month process but the inability of the panel to recommend one of its two competing proposals drew out the process for a year. Coast Guard issued its requirement for clearance of 500 feet between piers adjacent to Yerba Buena Island. This meant that a signature'' span was not structurally required, but merely aesthetic. Both of the panel's two final designs included the useless suspension structure, which would decorate the viaduct for an additional cost of up to $500 million. A viaduct-plus-suspension design, which joins two bridge types having radically distinct seismic behaviors, repeats the sin of the original bridge, which broke at just such a union. The asymmetrical, self-anchored suspension structure, having an inherently narrow margin of acceptable motion, has been condemned by some of the world's leading structural engineers, including Manabu Ito, Japan's most eminent bridge engineer, and UC-Berkeley professor Abolhassan Astaneh, an expert in the seismic behavior of bridges. What the selected proposal does do very well is serve as a bridge between public money and the accounts of private engineering firms represented on the MTC panel. Ironically, two proposals summarily dismissed were on southern alignments. It is partly over this issue that local leaders have sought help from a congressional delegation and the governor. Rail consideration had to be mandated by a ballot initiative because MTC refused to consider it. Alameda County Supervisor and MTC Bay Bridge Design Task Force Chairwoman Mary King complains that Jerry Brown did not show up at any Bay Bridge meetings, though Elihu Harris, not Brown, was mayor of Oakland when MTC approved the design. Mayor Harris, a member of King's task force, rejected the design with many of the same objections now spoken by Oakland's new mayor. And Caltrans Bay Bridge project manager Brian Maroney has assured us that some of the $40 million spent on the bridge has bought geological analyses and planning studies which need to be done in any case. Better that MTC's irrational and dangerous bridge collapse in concept rather than after it is built. BAY BRIDGE MEETING -- WHAT: Joint meeting of the MTC's Bay Bridge Design Task Force and Engineering and Design Advisory Panel to review alignment. Daniel Coman and Rick Feher, a Sacramento design partnership, participated in the Bay Bridge design process.
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