Wilson Bridge Opening Tonight at 11:30

[drevil]

@bobco85 158710 wrote:

I learned about this earlier today and wanted to pass it on: the Woodrow Wilson Bridge is going to be opening at 11:30 tonight. If you don’t know, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge which carries I-495 a.k.a. the Beltway is actually a DRAWBRIDGE!

Source of information was the Alexandria Police Department: https://twitter.com/AlexandriaVAPD/status/854314809587892224

I won’t be going tonight to see it (I saw it open last November), but I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it open. Shipyard Park in Old Town Alexandria is a good spot to watch it https://goo.gl/maps/48MGr6Y29Wu

Laughing to myself about some of the movies I can think of where cars are jumping across an open bridge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTOg4aYGtdY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XWpPwp8p_0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKJa-KQNjQU

And of course, the best one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzCIbhLUUA0

What other good ones are there?

[MFC]

@bobco85 158710 wrote:

I learned about this earlier today and wanted to pass it on: the Woodrow Wilson Bridge is going to be opening at 11:30 tonight. If you don’t know, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge which carries I-495 a.k.a. the Beltway is actually a DRAWBRIDGE!

Source of information was the Alexandria Police Department: https://twitter.com/AlexandriaVAPD/status/854314809587892224

I won’t be going tonight to see it (I saw it open last November), but I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it open. Shipyard Park in Old Town Alexandria is a good spot to watch it https://goo.gl/maps/48MGr6Y29Wu

I’ve seen it open a few times – it is really frigging cool. It is amazing how quiet the machinery that moves the bridge is, and how quiet it becomes when there is no traffic. I’ve watched from the park right under the bridge.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]14613[/ATTACH]

[drevil]

Are you allowed to be on the bridge with a bike when it goes up? Also, are you allowed to be on the bridge that late at night? I wonder if the MD and VA sides have different rules…

[mstone]

yes, it’s a drawbridge, because they were running out of ways to waste money

[LhasaCM]

@mstone 158716 wrote:

yes, it’s a drawbridge, because they were running out of ways to waste money

It’s a drawbridge because occasionally big ships need to come onto that side of the bridge In November, it opened to allow a Spanish replica galleon to dock in Alexandria.

As I recall, because the new bridge was built higher than the previous one, the numbers of times it has to open each year has been reduced dramatically.

[peterw_diy]

lhasacm;158717 wrote:

it’s a drawbridge because occasionally big ships need to come onto that side of the bridge

LOL. I’d love to know how much that feature added to the construction budget, how much it adds to the annual operating budgets, and the projected and actual frequency of usage. It’s good for Alexandria tourism, no doubt, but I bet it costs somewhere between $20,000 and $200,000 per ship voyage, not including the impact on Interstate traffic.

[LhasaCM]

@LhasaCM 158717 wrote:

It’s a drawbridge because occasionally big ships need to come onto that side of the bridge In November, it opened to allow a Spanish replica galleon to dock in Alexandria.

As I recall, because the new bridge was built higher than the previous one, the numbers of times it has to open each year has been reduced dramatically.

I think it was something like $200m of the $2.4b construction cost. (Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201700.html) Beyond the occasional ship traffic like that, it also has a potential utility should any large naval ships need to get close to DC. Not making it a drawbridge would’ve meant either an even higher bridge (so higher cost) or closing DC to certain sized ships.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N920A using Tapatalk

[peterw_diy]

Thanks! Wikipedia says the projection was 60 openings per year. At that rate, likely $50,000-$100,000 per opening, but based on these announcements it seems the bridge actually only opens one tenth that often, putting the cost around $500k-$1m per opening, $1m-2m per round trip. Does the Navy actually have fighting ships tall enough to need the drawbridge that can sail the Potomac? Quick searches suggest the really big boats like destroyers and aircraft carriers need 30-40′ of water but the channel just south of WWB is only about 20′, and there’s not enough tidal variation to make that navigable even at high tide, regardless of headroom / airspace.

[LhasaCM]

@peterw_diy 158731 wrote:

Thanks! Wikipedia says the projection was 60 openings per year. At that rate, likely $50,000-$100,000 per opening, but based on these announcements it seems the bridge actually only opens one tenth that often, putting the cost around $500k-$1m per opening, $1m-2m per round trip. Does the Navy actually have fighting ships tall enough to need the drawbridge that can sail the Potomac? Quick searches suggest the really big boats like destroyers and aircraft carriers need 30-40′ of water but the channel just south of WWB is only about 20′, and there’s not enough tidal variation to make that navigable even at high tide, regardless of headroom / airspace.

Not a fighting ship, but I think the Navy’s hospital ships are around 10 stories tall.

I think the projection of 60 was based on the previous 250/year that the older/lower bridge had to open. It does seem that it is far less often, especially if you ignore the ‘maintenance’ openings. (I think I remember reading somewhere that it opened 41 times in 2013, but many of those were for maintenance/testing.)

According to the Internets (http://www.roadstothefuture.com/Woodrow_Wilson_Bridge.html), Maryland favored a high bridge (around 135 feet up), but Alexandria wanted the lower drawbridge. That makes sense, given what was on each side of the river at the time. The FAA also favored a lower bridge, given the approach to DCA. Given their stereotypical behavior, I think I’m OK with whatever Maryland drivers did not want…

[mstone]

@LhasaCM 158729 wrote:

I think it was something like $200m of the $2.4b construction cost. (Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201700.html) Beyond the occasional ship traffic like that, it also has a potential utility should any large naval ships need to get close to DC. Not making it a drawbridge would’ve meant either an even higher bridge (so higher cost) or closing DC to certain sized ships.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N920A using Tapatalk

Yes, I remember the ridiculous arguments at the time. The added cost of 200M, while huge, is also a major low ball because it ignores the ongoing liability of a bridge that moves. (See the old Wilson bridge or a certain other Potomac bridge that doesn’t even open anymore–a movable thing is more fragile and maintenance intensive than a solid thing.) The reason there aren’t more openings is because the planning didn’t notice that DC isn’t really a port city. (It’s ok, George made that mistake also, right?) The projections missed the collapse of the vestiges of the region’s shipping industry. There was mumbling that the Navy needed to access the Navy Yard, but by now they’ve admitted that won’t happen. There was mumbling that we needed a draw bridge because one customer needed to access the port of Alexandria, but they’ve finally admitted that Alexandria wants condos more than a run down second rate dockland. There was mumbling about what if we needed to park a missile cruiser (too much Tom Clancy?) or hospital ship by the Jefferson memorial. Well, what if we needed to park a missile cruiser or hospital ship in Tyson’s or Omaha? Should we put in a bunch of canals now just in case we have to exercise a specific low probability option? Better answer: park the boat downstream of the bridge. If we’d just said no and built a shorter solid bridge we probably would have cut the life cycle cost of the project by more than half.

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[rcannon100]

Putting a navy ship in the middle of the potomac for any notion of defense would be moronic. The ship would be a sitting duck. Plus, most naval ships are sea going…. they would not do well in the shallows of the muddy silty Potomac. If you had some reason to defend DC – there are a couple of local air bases that might prove a better tactical advantage.

The draw bridge is opened multiple times a year. Most of these times are just to make sure the draw bridge can open. So the number of times the bridge NEEDS to open? And what does it need to open for? Tall Ships for Alexandria? You could just move Alexandria down river of the bridge for that cost……

[LhasaCM]

@mstone 158733 wrote:

Yes, I remember the ridiculous arguments at the time. The added cost of 200M, while huge, is also a major low ball because it ignores the ongoing liability of a bridge that moves. (See the old Wilson bridge or a certain other Potomac bridge that doesn’t even open anymore–a movable thing is more fragile and maintenance intensive than a solid thing.) The reason there aren’t more openings is because the planning didn’t notice that DC isn’t really a port city. (It’s ok, George made that mistake also, right?) The projections missed the collapse of the vestiges of the region’s shipping industry. There was mumbling that the Navy needed to access the Navy Yard, but by now they’ve admitted that won’t happen. There was mumbling that we needed a draw bridge because one customer needed to access the port of Alexandria, but they’ve finally admitted that Alexandria wants condos more than a run down second rate dockland. There was mumbling about what if we needed to park a missile cruiser (too much Tom Clancy?) or hospital ship by the Jefferson memorial. Well, what if we needed to park a missile cruiser or hospital ship in Tyson’s or Omaha? Should we put in a bunch of canals now just in case we have to exercise a specific low probability option? Better answer: park the boat downstream of the bridge. If we’d just said no and built a shorter solid bridge we probably would have cut the life cycle cost of the project by more than half.

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It probably wouldn’t have been savings of half; the construction cost of the bridge itself was only about 1/3 of the overall project; most of the money went towards the interchanges and surface highways leading up to the new bridge spans.

But yes – the original design and underlying math was based on the assumption that traffic at the time (i.e., the 250 openings per year) would remain constant, so needed to be accommodated. That, and the doomsday scenarios of battleships on the Potomac. More likely, you’d see large barge traffic carrying precast building segments that can’t fit through a normal train tunnel, but most of those can probably fit under the new/higher span. In any event, that lead to the options of either (1) a high bridge that anything could get under (roughly same initial cost, Maryland loved it, but the FAA and Virginia did not); (2) the current design (higher ongoing maintenance of moving parts); or (3) a tunnel (higher initial cost and higher ongoing maintenance).

[Crickey7]

You might want the ability to bring naval ships close in for disaster relief, like as happened after the Indian Ocean tsunami.

[peterw_diy]

Another observation: the money added to include the drawbridge on WWB would have paid for all the work needed now for Memorial Bridge.

[mstone]

@rcannon100 158736 wrote:

Tall Ships for Alexandria? You could just move Alexandria down river of the bridge for that cost……

I bet national harbor could be convinced to host any floating tourist attraction that couldn’t fit under the wilson bridge.

@LhasaCM 158737 wrote:

It probably wouldn’t have been savings of half; the construction cost of the bridge itself was only about 1/3 of the overall project; most of the money went towards the interchanges and surface highways leading up to the new bridge spans.[/quote]

A significant part of that was the result of trying to compensate for the traffic problems of having to get heavy trucks to suddenly go up a hill that really doesn’t need to be there, and provide room to park the vehicles stopped for a bridge opening…the knock-on effects of this whole silly boat thing were huge. Also note that “life cycle costs” includes decades of drawbridge operations & maintenance, not just the construction. I can’t wait to see the studies for how much it will cost to weld the thing shut once pieces start falling off.

Quote:

More likely, you’d see large barge traffic carrying precast building segments that can’t fit through a normal train tunnel, but most of those can probably fit under the new/higher span.

How do landlocked cities manage without their construction barges?

[Author]

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