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Random thoughts here...
When they replaced the Rouge River Bridge in Detroit (part of I-75), from what I can remember, they built the bridge and rebuilt part of the freeway and then connected those to the old freeway. You can still see a draw bridge next to the original. I think they did this with the big Zilwaukee bridge over the Saginaw River up north. This can lead to minimal traffic disruption. It's not like the old bridge was out of commission the whole time the new one was being built. That was happening on either I-75 or 280 in Toledo also.
I saw a poll on some news channel yesterday "Should we pay for health care or fixing infrastructure like bridges?" My answer would be BOTH, instead of some of the other junk we pay for. Maybe that bridge to nowhere shoulda been somewhere else.
Infrastructure, if done right, seems like it should last a very long time. Pyramids? Isn't the basic infrastructure in Europe much older than ours? It seems like if it is maintained properly, it could last.
I agree that structurally deficient probably means something very different to civil engineers than it sounds to us. In my experience with inspections in health care, it is their job to find deficiencies and they will find some deficiency no matter what. The level of deficiency will vary and the number will vary, but every hospital in the country gets Type I and Type II recommendations from JCAHO. (Type I being more major than Type II). If a bad thing happened at any given hospital and those accreditation inspection reports were pulled, it would sound bad to lay people, I think.
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