As we have noted many times, the new eastern span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge came in 10 years late and a whopping $5 billion over budget, but all that time and money could not guarantee safety for the public. In 2007, fissures some 10 feet long cut through a steel bar 20…
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As we recently noted, the California Department of Transportation employs 3,500 full-time engineers who do little more than sit at their desks. The state’s Legislative Analyst wants to cut these positions, but Caltrans executives cried foul. So did union boss Bruce Blanning, executive director of Professional Engineers in California Government. Blanning told reporters the…
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As we have repeatedly noted, the stylish new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was 10 years in the making, a whopping $5 billion over budget, and yet riddled with safety issues. We have done our best to keep up with the problems, but they keep on coming. As Jaxon Van Derbeken…
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At the end of our recent piece on the Great Crane Giveaway, we observed that “when it comes to big government and bureaucracy, things are always worse than they seem.” As it turns out, the crane giveaway wasn’t the end of it, as San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross point out….
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The new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has already rung up $5 billion in cost overruns. The span also came in 10 years late and could well pose a danger to the public. As we recently noted, UC Berkeley structural engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asi believes the structure is unsafe and declines…
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California deploys some of the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, but the Golden State’s pillage people are worried that they might not be high enough. They now want to more than double registration fees on motor vehicles, more accurately known as the car tax. The car tax is based on .65…
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“Look, s— happens.” That was California governor Jerry Brown, a former candidate for President of the United States, responding to reports of faulty bolts and rods on the new span of the Bay Bridge linking Oakland and San Francisco. The governor didn’t get into why, exactly, all that happened, but it’s worth a look….
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