- #176
Vanadium 50
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Education Advisor
2023 Award
- 35,005
- 21,683
Let's turn it around. Suppose I can make bridges twice as unlikely to fail by increasing the cost by a factor of 10. Should I?
Might it not make more sense to build more bridges to increase redundancy rather than fewer but stronger bridges?
I don't know the exact number, but there are ~1500 bridges at least that long in the US. When was the last collapse? 2007 and I-35W? So we are talking a MTBF of something like 20,000 years.
To me, this sounds pretty good. Spending a lot of energy trying to get this to 30,000 or 50,000 seems tough. If you want to argue "nothing is more important than safety", by making drivers take the long way, you are causing more automobile fatalities. These are less dramatic and seldom make the news, but that doesn't mean they aren't real. The optimum point may be more, cheaper bridges.
Might it not make more sense to build more bridges to increase redundancy rather than fewer but stronger bridges?
I don't know the exact number, but there are ~1500 bridges at least that long in the US. When was the last collapse? 2007 and I-35W? So we are talking a MTBF of something like 20,000 years.
To me, this sounds pretty good. Spending a lot of energy trying to get this to 30,000 or 50,000 seems tough. If you want to argue "nothing is more important than safety", by making drivers take the long way, you are causing more automobile fatalities. These are less dramatic and seldom make the news, but that doesn't mean they aren't real. The optimum point may be more, cheaper bridges.