Fix The Blue Bridge

This morning, Victoria’s city councillors will sit down and try to figure out what to do next, now that it’s clear they won’t be getting millions in federal stimulus cash for a new Johnson Street Bridge. By all indications, they’re going to push ahead with the $63-million project anyway. The City’s website says “a good case” can be made for proceeding because interest rates are low, so we should borrow as much as possible – a similar rationale used by subprime-mortgaged homeowners when trading in their bungalows for luxury mansions.

Instead, I’m hoping the councillors wake up to the fact that Victoria can’t afford a new bridge. As I wrote in a report to them earlier this week, many other cities have crunched the numbers, and decided to refurbish their aging steel bridges instead of replacing them. We should learn from their experience, and repair the Blue Bridge.

In April, the Delcan engineering firm submitted a condition assessment of the bridge to the council, and it said that repair not only is feasible, but relatively inexpensive. The only work that needs doing immediately involves electrical and mechanical repairs, costing about $2 million. Fixing the bridge’s corroded steel and repainting would be another $3 million.

The biggest part of the $23 million Delcan quoted for repair is for seismic upgrading. But they list a menu of options for that, and some of them – such as seismically isolating the span that holds up the bridge’s huge counterweights - could greatly reduce the bridge’s earthquake vulnerability without much cost. In 1999, San Fransicso seismically upgraded its “Lefty O’Doul” drawbridge (right) – like ours, also designed by Joseph Strauss of Golden Gate Bridge fame – for $10 million.

Since the Blue Bridge has never been part of the city’s emergency plans, though, how much seismic upgrading do we really need? Recently I corresponded with Ed Wortman, an engineer who’s overseen the rehabilitation of several of Portland’s movable steel bridges, he said his city has put money into repairs and steelwork instead of quake-proofing because it’s not worth the cost. After reading Delcan’s assessment, he recommended that we thoroughly repair our bridge without a seismic retrofit. “It would still provide a reliable structure for at least the next 40 to 50 years barring a major quake,” he wrote. “If the ‘Big One’ occurs during that period, Victoria will have plenty to deal with other than the possible loss of the Johnson Street Bridge.”

Of course, repainting the old bridge could also inconvenience downtown businesses. But Mr. Wortman told me that Portland has learned how to minimize bridge closures by planning its repair work in sections, and clearly notifying the public about traffic changes. Vancouver recently managed to overhaul the Lions’ Gate Bridge, and still kept it open to commuters. Ottawa is currently doing the same with its 1899-built Alexandra Bridge (left).

Besides, a few months of restricted traffic may not be a bad tradeoff compared to the effects of borrowing $63 million. Victoria’s assistant city manager has said such a debt would “financially strap the city,” leading to tax increases or service cutbacks. (Victoria police have already said they’re withdrawing from the regional crime unit to save money.) Those cutbacks could hurt downtown as much as any inconveniences from repainting the Blue Bridge.

Cyclists may be disappointed, too. Lately they’ve been arguing for a new bridge by pointing out problems with the existing one, including confusing access to the Galloping Goose trail, poor signage, absent sidewalk ramps, and the slipperiness of the metal deck. As a fellow cyclist, I feel their pain. But a lot of these issues could be resolved with a cement mixer and a few cans of paint and non-slip coating, and far more cheaply than by erecting a new crossing that would consume all the city’s funds for cycling facilities for years. If Portlanders can figure out how to integrate bicycles into their heritage bridges, so can we.

Our heritage may also be greater than we realized. Last week I spoke with Eric DeLony, a historian who ran a national engineering archive for the U.S. Department of the Interior, and knows more about America’s 250,000 bridges than anyone else. He noted that we actually have two bridges, side-by-side – and as far as he is aware, ours is the only parallel-spanned Strauss bascule bridge in existence. “You have something there that’s not just unusual, but actually unique,” he said.

Instead of blowing $63 million on a fancy new tourist-attraction bridge, we should appreciate what we’ve got, and fix it.

PS This post originally appeared as an op-ed in today’s Times Colonist; to read the online comments, click here. Many thanks to Bob Horowitz for letting me use his photo of the Lefty O’Doul bridge.

UPDATE (October 10, 2009): Victoria’s council decided to receive the information in my report, and consider the engineering department’s proposal to remove rail from a new bridge, which would shave $15 million from the $63-million price tag. Story here. The Times Colonist followed up with an editorial, telling the City to start the bridge project from scratch.

A New Bridge, A New Problem

Tomorrow at 5:00 pm, Victoria’s city council will vote to pursue one of three designs for a new Johnson Street Bridge. Which criteria will weigh most heavily as councillors make the city’s biggest aesthetic decision in decades is anyone’s guess. Will they support the winner of the online survey? Will they be swayed by letters to editors? Will they use research of their own, or will they – like American Idol judges – be governed by personal taste and gut instinct?

All three designs are supposed to satisfy the same transportation requirements – three car lanes, two bicycle lanes, a pedestrian walkway, a multi-modal path, and a railway track. They’re all to meet current earthquake standards, and cost around $63 million to build. But there’s one more characteristic that’s common to all three, and crucially important if the City gets time-limited federal-provincial money to build the bridge: There are no working duplicates of these designs.

Not long ago, I got an interesting email from a fellow who attended one of the City’s open houses promoting a new bridge. “I asked about something that has been bugging me about the cable-stayed option ever since the three designs were unveiled,” he wrote. “The Erasmus Bridge, which is noted as the inspiration, is of course a cable-stayed bridge, but as you might know, it does not lift ... it has a separate leaf-bascule at one end [photo above right]. So, I asked if there were any ‘cable-stayed bascule bridges’ in existence.

“I was surprised at how the answers went from something like ‘there must be at least a few’ to ‘I don’t know if there are any’ to ‘the engineers say it will work’,” he continued. “Anyway, I don't think there are any cable-stayed lift spans in existence, and if that’s true I don’t believe such a novel design could have been legitimately vetted in such a short amount of time. I would have liked to have spoken with the engineers themselves, but they weren’t present.”

Intrigued, I wrote to Sebastian Ricard, the creator of the three designs and a director of the London-based Wilkinson Eyre architecture firm, to ask for more details. Below is my Q&A with him, with links to various bridges he mentions.

Q: One of the designs is for a cable-stayed bascule bridge. It seems the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam which provided the inspiration has the cable-stayed portion separate from the moving bascule portion. Are there any working examples in the world where the cables actually lift the span, or would this proposed bridge be something new?

A: The Erasmus bridge was highlighted through our presentation as an example of Cable Stayed bridge for people not familiar with the bridge terminology to understand what a “cable stayed bridge” is, not as inspiration as such. Regarding example of “cable supported moving bridges”, bascule system, a few examples would be:

Tyne Bridge [photo left] in Newcastle UK, by Wilkinson Eyre Architects built in 2001. - Binic Port Footbridge 1993 Architect Fauniere Lafon France Britany - La Porta d’Europa Construction 2000 in Catalonia (not a cable stayed structure as such but a bridge which is “working” in a similar structural way).

Q: Are there any working examples of the reverse bascule bridge you proposed? (Aside from the one in the Van Gogh painting, of course!)

A: The “reverse bascule” bridge system or high level counterweight bascule system is a very familiar and well know opening bridge technology. The existing Johnson Street Bridge based on Strauss Design is one example.

Other examples would be: Alcacer Do Sal Bascule Bridge - Bordigue Canal Road Bridge, Sete, France - Brother Edmund Ignatius Waterford Ireland 1982-86 - Diffenebrucke Bridge on the Rhine River 1986-87 - Forton Lake Opening Bridge UK, 2000 - Demmin Bridge Germany 1998-2000

Also regarding Rolling Bascule bridges, see below a few examples: Canary Wharf Rolling Bridge [photo right] Wilkinson Eyre Architects - Bizerte Tunisia 1978-1980 - Borensberg Bascule Bridge Sweden - Dvorcoviy Most Bridge, St Petersburg 1977-78 on the Neva River.

Q: If these designs are new, how long would it take to render them into working engineering plans?

A: Our 3 proposals are based on bridge and movable bridge principle which are not new as such (examples of these typologies of structure exist as noted above) but each of these proposals has been tailored to respond to site specific issues and to create a new landmark, a gateway to Victoria: A unique bridge design rather than a “copy” of another bridge which wouldn’t respond to the specific site constraints.

As for every bespoke [i.e. “custom-made to the buyer's specification”] design (whether these are for Bridges or other Architectural/ Structural designs) there is the need to refine the design, test it, up to detail design stage before we can prepare a set of Tender Information. The timing for this work relates to the type of procurement: as to whether or not the design team prepares all the design information or whether the design team completes a set of “detail design information” which is then given to a Contractor who will complete the remaining part of the design.

This type of procurement allows the contractor to start the construction at an early stage, without having to rely on the full information on the design being completed (this type of procurement is typically used in fast track programmes.)

The decision on the procurement methodology hasn’t yet been finalized but will be shortly in association with the City of Victoria.

To Ricard’s credit, these are not cookie-cutter designs. On September 8, when he revealed the three, he repeatedly referred to wanting to “explore” various ideas with each one. In his cable-stayed bridge, for example, the support span actually bows down as the movable span lifts. In his rolling bascule, pedestrians would actually be able to walk through the wheel [drawing below left], and watch the mechanism of the bridge as it raises.

It’s great that Victoria could have a one-of-a-kind bridge. But this does create a new problem. As Ricard said, “there is the need to refine the design, test it, up to detail design stage” to create working engineering plans and procure materials. According to the timeline presented by the City’s engineering department on May 21, work in the water on a new bridge must begin in November. That’s five weeks from now. I spoke with an American bridge engineer who’s been watching this project with interest, and he told me that the City’s schedule is “extremely aggressive”: hundreds of details will have to line up perfectly if the project is to be finished by March 2011. Getting working engineering plans will be only the first of them.

Consequently, even if the City does get federal-provincial infrastructure stimulus funding, it’s highly unlikely a new bridge will be finished by March 2011 when the stimulus money runs out. That won’t matter much to MMM, the firm overseeing the project, because they’ll get paid anyway. But it makes a huge difference to Victoria taxpayers, who will be covering all the bills after March 2011.

It will be exciting to see which design wins the City’s popularity contest tomorrow. Unfortunately, Victorians still don’t know who’s doling out the prize money – and how much of it will be coming out of their own pockets.

UPDATE (September 24, 2009): An emotional day at City Hall. Victoria was turned down for federal-provincial infrastructure money. The council went ahead and chose a new design anyway: the rolling bascule, mainly because it was unanimously endorsed by the Citizens’ Advisory Committee. The City may have a tough time selling it to the public, though. The cable-stayed actually got more votes (2572 or 49.5%) than the rolling bascule (1885 votes or 36.3%) in the online and onsite surveys.

That Old Blue Bridge

This evening, Victoria’s city council will introduce a bylaw to borrow $63-million to replace the Johnson Street Bridge. Then, on September 8, City Hall will unveil three possible designs for the replacement, as part of a huge PR campaign to generate enthusiasm for a new bridge – and make Victorians forget about the one that’s already there.

Up front, I should mention that I’m a director of johnsonstreetbridge.org, a group that’s criticized the hurried, closed-door process that’s so far marked our city’s most expensive public-works project. But as someone who also writes a local history blog, and values what’s unique about Victoria, I think it’s also necessary to explain the background of the existing bridge before it's sentenced to death.

Politicians argued over the Johnson Street Bridge for nearly 25 years before it was built. In 1888, a steel swing bridge was constructed across the Inner Harbour, bringing the E&N railway into downtown to satisfy Victoria’s demands for a national-rail connection promised by Confederation. But within a decade, Victorians began calling for a new bridge to carry a wider variety of vehicles, including newfangled automobiles, enabling a direct traffic route from Oak Bay to Esquimalt.

In 1911, the British Columbia government bought the Songhees native reserve on west side of the harbour, and then plunged into negotiations over a new bridge, and who should pay for it, with the City of Victoria, the E&N, and the B.C. Electric streetcar company. The parties didn’t reach an agreement until 1919. In a referendum the following year, fed-up Victorians voted six-to-one in favour of a municipal bylaw to borrow money to construct a new bridge.

For designs, the City turned to Joseph Baermann Strauss (photo right). Born in Cincinnati, Strauss was a poet and self-promoting romantic who never obtained an engineering degree, but learned everything about bridge-building while working for construction firms. In Chicago, around 1902, he patented an improved steel bascule (the French word for “see-saw”) drawbridge, using a huge concrete counterweight to balance the span upon a fixed-heel trunnion, or set of axles, ingeniously enabling the overhead truss to fold up as the span lifted. Thanks to the growing demands of automobile traffic, and availability of electric power for lifting motors, Strauss created some 400 bascule drawbridges around the world. His reputation as the “king of drawbridges” in turn got him the job as chief engineer of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. (Strauss is sometimes erroneously called the “designer” of the Golden Gate, but historians have shown that the real credit should have gone to his employees.)

The City of Victoria’s engineering office, led by F.M. Preston, built the Johnson Street Bridge’s substructure and approaches. Another team, using steel shipped from Ontario, assembled the Strauss bascules with the spans pointing upright to attach the counterweights. There were a few hangups – unions threatened to strike because day-labourers worked on the site, and lawsuits plagued the city’s expropriation of land around the bridge – and it did not officially open until January 11, 1924. British Columbia premier John Oliver told the thousands attending the ceremony, “I wish to congratulate the people upon the completion of a protracted and somewhat expensive undertaking.” The final cost was $918,000, some 27 percent higher than first estimated – a cautionary tale for Victoria’s councillors, who maintain that the City can build a new bridge within budget by March 2011.

Such history has value. The top photo, for example, is taken from the August issue of United Airlines’ in-flight magazine, proving that the old bridge is one of the elements that gives Victoria’s Inner Harbour its unique charm. Below is a scene from the 1999 movie Excess Baggage, which the producers shot in Victoria specifically to use the bridge:



This past April, Vancouver heritage expert Harold Kalman delivered a report – which the City has not publicly released, but you can download here – identifying the bridge as a “very significant heritage landmark” of Victoria’s industrial and transportation history. It’s unknown exactly how many of Strauss’s bascule bridges survive today – perhaps a few dozen – but several are identified as historic sites, such as Toronto’s 1931-built Cherry Street Bridge. Nathan Holth, a Michigan researcher who runs historicbridges.org, told me that all movable bridges are rare, mainly because they're built only to cross navigable rivers or canals where the long approaches for a high-reaching fixed bridge would be impossible. He considers ours an “important heritage bridge,” especially unique because it is actually two differently-sized parallel bridges that can be lifted independently.

Admittedly, preserving history also has a price. The City is pushing for a new bridge mainly because an engineering assessment said it would cost $25 million to rehabilitate the old one, although most of that is for seismic upgrading. Steel bridges, especially ones with intricate latticework like ours, contain thousands of difficult-to-reach joints, often hiding corrosion that’s accelerated by salty air. Repairing and repainting such bridges is an ongoing headache, especially compared to ones made of concrete. Nevertheless, some places re-invest in their old steel bridges. Toronto refurbished its Cherry Street Bridge for $2.6 million in 2007, and recently Boston and San Francisco spent tens of millions renovating their Strauss drawbridges as well.

Some say that paying anything to renew our bridge is a waste because it’s “ugly”, but that’s a superficial judgement. The truth, most apparent and impressive when you see it working, is that the Johnson Street Bridge is a giant machine from a vanished age. It’s like a rare and unusual grandfather clock – which the owner has decided is too much trouble to repair, and wants to replace with a shiny new timepiece under warranty.

This would be repeating a mistake the City has made before. We once had streetcars, a public market building, and the grand Victoria Brewery, and we demolished them all in the name of “progress”. Now, too late, we wish we had kept them. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

PS Thanks to Deddeda Stemler for the opening photo, and Lotus Johnson for the one of the latticework. The Johnson Street Bridge not only inspires photographers, but musicians too: check out these videos by The Bills and an ‘80s punk band, The Wardells.