“You're on a bridge to nowhere and you're gettin' there fast.
Put it in the past, put it in the past.” — Sam Roberts
This past year, a mere five since expensive repairs were conducted to the historic Traffic Bridge that were guaranteed to make it last a generation longer, the bridge has again been condemned—this time, for good. Not only the bridge this time, but also the pricey Meewasin trail below it, Saskatchewan Crescent, and half the river. Why? Because the bridge is about to collapse under its own weight.
This morning, Saskatonians woke up to the news I’d seen coming fifteen years ago: the Traffic Bridge is to be torn down. Yes, this is the old one, the first bridge built in Saskatoon just shy of 100 years ago, the one with the sign that read “Walk your horses” when it opened. Its demise is bad enough—but some interesting facts came out during the accompanying uproar that ought to make the blood of any sentient tax-payer boil:
> The bridge is made of iron. Iron bridges need to be painted at least once every fifteen years.
> The last time the Traffic Bridge was painted was in 1977. It’s been rusting away, unchecked by any effort of civic administration, for 34 years.
> City council did vote a few years back to put nearly half a million dollars into the bridge. They paid it to a foreign firm to attach strings of decorative LED lights. These broke down frequently for the first year, were not very visible against the bridge’s black (or rust brown) colour, and continue to be lit twenty-four hours a day for no apparent reason whatever (see my entry for 23 September, and Councillor Charlie Clark’s response to my question).
> At least one city councillor chastised the public to stop the blame game, saying no one was to blame for this. After all, how could the city engineers have possibly seen this coming?
Huh?
If ever there was a time for the blame game, it is now. As plans are made for the bridge’s hyper-expensive, taxpayer-funded replacement, shouldn’t we be asking just who’s butt is being canned, and how soon? Might the concept of criminal incompetence even come into play here? Should someone be going to jail? I’m no engineer, yet even I knew the bridge was failing. It occurred to me one day back in 1996 as I simply walked across it. No, I don’t have ESP, but I do possess the uncanny skill of BCS (Basic Common Sense). If the city engineers needed some (as apparently they did), they could have borrowed some of mine—or just about anyone else’s.
(One Star-Phoenix columnist suggested that the condemned bridge be used to hold council meetings. That way, he observed, if the bridge collapsed, “at least we’d get a new city council”.)
In the end, one is left with the following thoughts:
> The bridge as it stands being such a glaring symbol of administrative incompetence, you can bet that its demolition will be soon, and fast.
> It’s unlikely that such incompetence was entirely focussed on one small part of the city’s infrastructure. How many other bridges are about to fail due to unseen problems caused by lack of basic maintenance? What about overpasses and access ramps? What hidden faults lay in waiting at our power substations, civic buildings, etc? Maybe skyrocketing crime rates are the least of our problems after all.
> When the new bridge is built, will the taxpayers of Saskatoon pay it all off before it too fails? After all, the city didn’t bother maintaining the old one. Only an idiot would expect different results from the same set of actions—or the same administrators.
“Walk your horses”, indeed.
