The SF-Oakland Bay Bridge is THE critical transportation link in the Bay Area. The most heavily traveled bridge, it's an essential link that sees a massive amount of traffic everyday. During the 1989 earthquake, the bridge was severely damaged, and later study revealed what engineers had long known: the bridge is not engineered to withstand a major earthquake. What's interesting about this bridge is how the eastern span if a fundamentally different style of bridge than the SF side. For those of you not familiar with the area, the 2 bridge spans are connected by Treasure Island... no, not the Vegas hotel. It's officially named Yerba Buena Island, but everyone calls it Treasure Island. The reason the bridge spans are different, even though they were built at the same time, is that the surface of SF Bay is radically different on each side of the island, the eastern side is effectively mud flats while the western side is hard base rock. This distinction in the Bay necessitated a different style of bridge construction (remember, this bridge was built the early 1930's). What all this means is that only one half of the bridge, the eastern span, needs to be replaced.
Caltrans has been working on this project for years with a combination of federal and state money, as well as funds generated from an increase in bridge tolls. I think that Caltrans has already spent close to $2 billion on the original engineering and design, and the base construction work. They put out a request for proposal to build the actual bridge span, it was expected that the bids would come in at around $800 million. Yesterday, the agency revealed the actual bid of $1.8 billion! Surely, $1 billion dollars over their estimate raises a lot of questions, like say, who the hell did their original estimate and does he/she still have a job?
There's actually a number of interesting things to note here. First and foremost, there was only ONE bid submitted! It appears that the cost of acquiring insurance was enough of an issue to prevent other qualified bidders from considering it. Sure, there's not a lot of companies that can do a job this size, but there is certainly more than one.
Second, the $1.8 billion bid is the bid for the job using American steel, while the bidders included a second bid that is $400 million cheaper just by using foreign sourced steel, but Caltrans is prohibited from accepting that bid because California law requires them to use American steel. So essentially, the residents of California are stuck with a $400 million bill for steel that comes from the other side of the country. How is that benefiting Californians? I would much prefer using the $400 million to pay down our massive $90+ billion in debt ("bonds" for you voters that voted for them).
http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/9441426p-10365472c.html
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