Flutterby™! : Bay Bridge Bad News OTD

From $250 Million to $6.5 Billion: The Bay Bridge Cost Overrun: A new book offers insights on how yet another huge mega-project soared way over budget.

UC Berkeley planning scholar Karen Trapenberg Frick meticulously chronicles the reconstructed bridge in a new book, Remaking the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. With Frick and her book as guide, CityLab tracked bridge expenses over time to get some sense of how the project that Herbert Hoover once called “the greatest bridge yet constructed in the world” became yet another example of a major public works project in which the cost ended outrageously higher than it began—and some ideas for what to do about it.

The sad part is that there's probably going to need to be a second edition on the book, Experts urge quick action to protect Bay Bridge cable:

The cable is wrapped with steel and filled with corrosion-fighting paste, and its suspended cables are painted white. But the panel said such “conventional methods” have “not been effective on large numbers of these bridges around the world.”