Detroit's $3.5 Billion Bridge to the Future

With its twin 900-foot towers and silvery steel cables, the $3.5 billion bridge is a striking symbol of Detroit's rebirth. But it is something more than that. Along with a new rail tunnel and an intermodal freight-transfer hub, it's a monument to those who knew that Detroit needed a dramatic stroke. By 2025, new transportation infrastructure has turned the city into a humming trade gateway between the American Midwest and the world. But first it had to overcome some tangled history.

Opened in 1929 to connect Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, the Ambassador Bridge became the busiest international border crossing between the U.S. and its largest trading partner. By 2010, the rickety relic was carrying a quarter of the $500 billion in annual trade between the U.S. and Canada. With truck traffic expected to double by 2035, local politicians and business and labor leaders pushed hard for the new bridge. "Our company sends 600 trucks over the Ambassador Bridge every day," Ford executive chairman Bill Ford says. "What if something happens to the bridge? Of course we need a new bridge!"

Since 1979, the Ambassador Bridge has been the private property of Manuel "Matty" Moroun, who started out working in his father's gas station and became a billionaire by buying up all the shares of the privately financed bridge in the 1970s, then pocketing the profits from tolls, duty-free shops, and gas pumps. Forbes magazine called it "the best monopoly you never heard of." And Moroun fought hard to protect it through well-publicized contributions to politicians and a multimillion-dollar campaign to sway public opinion.

It was long-simmering resentment toward Moroun, in part, that ignited the charge to greenlight the new bridge project. Canada agreed to contribute $2.3 billion. It has not cost Michigan taxpayers a dime.

Long before the financing came together, Ted Zoli?chief bridge engineer of HNTB Corp. and winner of the MacArthur Foundation's coveted genius grant?was on the case. Zoli knew that the new bridge would be much more than a point-A-to-point-B proposition: It is playing a big role in jump-starting Detroit's and Michigan's economic engines. Achieving that goal has been helped by the fact that the bridge is publicly financed and generates public revenue. But the way the bridge itself came to be is also important.

Zoli, whose unmistakable designs now span waterways from Boston to Mumbai, built his career on a simple premise: "Cleverness in design and construction techniques can be a source of major savings in the cost of building and maintaining a bridge," he says.

In Detroit he went against the grain. Most bridge builders today prefer prefabricated steel orthotropic decks, an advanced technology also used in shipbuilding. But Zoli opted for a simpler, somewhat old-fashioned steel-reinforced grid deck on his Detroit bridge.

"The sections of an orthotropic deck would usually be manufactured outside the United States?probably in Brazil, Korea, or China," he says. "What worse thing could you do to Detroit? This was an opportunity to create an American-made bridge. Plus, I'm very interested in adapting technology that's maybe less sophisticated or less modern and reimagining what it could be."

While a high-tech orthotropic deck is generally more expensive than a grid deck, the latter requires more labor to fabricate and install. In job-hungry Michigan, Zoli reasoned, a vice became a virtue. Not only can the grid decking be manufactured locally, but a large crew is needed to fit together the deck plates?roughly 1000 laborers working over a six-year period.

Zoli lightheartedly calls the technology stupidly simple, because each deck section is an identical rectangular 8 x 10?foot steel piece. But when the sections are put in place, each angled a fraction of a degree, a gracefully curving roadway emerges, supported by a steel superstructure. Stupidly simple? Maybe. But also brilliant, durable, and expensive-looking without being expensive.

A final consideration was the site. Zoli advised positioning his bridge about 2 miles downriver from the Ambassador Bridge, far from downtown. "It really is a regional bridge," Zoli says. "It doesn't make sense to disrupt the heart of the city with all that truck traffic."

Zoli views bridge building primarily as an act of public service, not as a way of burnishing his personal legend. He rebels against the notion of "signature" structures, a concept embraced by many brand-name architects, so-called starchitects, who flourished in those heady years before the Great Recession descended. "Signature is something I want to take off these things," Zoli says. "This bridge is not an architectural monument or an engineering feat. It becomes monumental only if it's seen as something that serves the community."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/rebuilding-america/detroits-3-5-billion-dollar-bridge-to-the-future-13115581?src=rss

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