Collapse

Click on this picture.

We don't yet know all the details behind why one section of interstate collapsed upon another in San Francisco after a crash set off a tanker truck carrying 8,600 gallons of gasoline. Does this always happen when bridges are subjected to, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, 3000 degrees of heat? Is this, as the insurance folks put it, force majeur - an "act of God" - or more evidence of the systematic problems of America's infrastructure under conservative rule, and thus preventable? I don't know.

Those are the kind of questions we at The Big Con will be asking - and you should be asking, too.

I don't know either if California has a good Department of Transportation or a bad one, or a satisfactory transportation budget or an inadequate one. I don't know whether California - home of a historic property tax reform in 1978 which has kept municipal budgets chronically underfunded - keeps around enough money to respond to the inevitable emergencies (and emergencies are always inevitable). Do they have the resources required to keep the 80,000 vehicles that use the spur efficiently detoured, and avoid a hit on the local economy with a minimum of inconvenience?

People described the bridge looking like a slab of melting plastic. Maybe there's no way to prevent a bridge from melting under the onslaught of 8,600 gallons of burning gasoline; I don't know. If you do, please share in the comments.

I know that a municiple engineer told the Chronicle that reconstruction might be delayed by a local steel shortage. Was that preventable? Did, say, President Bush's tax cuts end up taxing whatever municipal agency it is in charge of loosening up bottlenecks to get vital materials to the right place in case of emergencies? He also said "there is $10 billion worth of construction currently going on in the Bay Area -- and all those projects need concrete and steel." I don't know what powers of eminent domain might or might not be able to be activated when an accident nearly shuts down a city - and how badly those powers might have atrophied under the reign of conservatism, with its abiding obsession against government "takings" of any kind.

All Bay Area transit systems offered free rides today to ease the congestion, but that this will hardly be enough ("'We are sharply limited in our ability to add extra service,"' said AC Transit spokesman Clarence Johnson, who noted there is extra capacity on its Transbay service on normal weekdays. It's not like we have a bunch of extra buses or drivers sitting around.'") Governor Schwarzenegger has made emergency declaration that provides $2.5 million to reimburse mass transit agencies for the service. I don't know: can the state budget absorb the hit - and for how many days?

What I do know is that "27.5% of the nation's bridges (162,000) are rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete by the Federal Highway Administration, and that in their 2001 infrastructure report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's bridges a C."

What I also know: an infrastructural disaster like this is a nearly inevitable component of any future terrorist attack. And that in their latest report card the nation's bridges still rated a "C" - because of a conservative Congress's inability "to reauthorize the nation's Transportation Equity Act of the 21st Century (TEA-21), which has now had six extensions since the program expired on September 30, 2003."

I know that Tennessee is handling its transportation budget shortfall by making a "thinner application of asphalt in some projects"

And what I don't know, finally, is this: if the Republicans have done anything in the six and a half years since 9/11 to make the situation any easier when it comes, I have yet to discover what.

Smile, San Francisco. And pray that the next collapse isn't Al Qaeda's work.

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive. My CAF colleague Isaiah J. Poole covered transporation for Congressional Quarterly He points out that the bill finally passed in 2005, but with not enough funding to even maintain the current highway and transit network without significant state, local and private funds. Sponsors of the bill had been pushing for a five-cent increase in the gasoline tax. The revenues would be split between highway and transit upgrades (such as more buses and BART trains for the San Francisco area). When the five-cent tax increase was first broached, opponents used the excuse that the nickle tax would mean the poor could not afford gasoline anymore.

Says Isaiah: "Well, a roughly $1.50 increase in the average price of gasoline later, the highway trust fund - which would receive the increased revenue - doesn't have the funds to pay for emergencies like the San Francisco accident or for beefed-up transit service to compensate. All because of an all-taxes-are-evil mindset."

What was the old saying about penny wise and pound foolish? Just another truism gone by the wayside under the nightmare of conservative rule.