Editorials

What should it be called?

How about the Bridge of Lost Opportunity?

It's final: The state Highway Department has chosen to spend $98.4 million on a new bridge across the Arkansas River at Little Rock--even though a new bridge there isn't clearly necessary. For the storied old Broadway Bridge is still structurally sound, and just needs some maintenance work, as it's needed in the past. All bridges do. Here we have another example of Your Tax Money at Work--needlessly.

The biggest question about this new bridge is a simple one: Why? There doesn't seem to be clear reason to build a new bridge instead of maintaining the old one. Except maybe the bureaucratic inertia that seems to beset some planners, mainly bad ones. They seem captive of the first rule of government: When there's public money available, spend it. Preferably lots of it. If the state's Highway Department had an appropriate motto on its seal, it might be: Keep Busy.

This $98.4 million bill includes $20 million that would come from Pulaski County's taxpayers to pay for an elaborate basket-like structure that would be added to the bridge--so it'll look like something a giant could lift.

If the first casualty of government planning is economy, the second may be public convenience. Note that this $98.4 million doesn't cover the costs in disruption, delay, and general inconvenience to the public--especially to local commuters, businesses, drivers just passing through Central Arkansas, and all who'll find their schedules altered by this unnecessary interruption.

At last estimate this new bridge to be thrown across the Arkansas will have to be closed to traffic (including the 24,000 drivers or so who use the old one every day) for a still undetermined time.

The whole project could take more than two years to complete. Just when the old bridge will have to be shut down to make room for its replacement hasn't been announced. Nor did the Highway Department, at last report, ever get around to making any estimate of how much it would have cost to just maintain the old bridge instead of tearing it down and replacing it for $98.4 million.

But there's a far greater cost involved here. The aesthetic cost. Think of how much money might have been saved by just fixing up the old bridge and saving the considerable cost of a new one, plus interest, to fulfill a great vision: a grand new bridge across the Arkansas. The current fashionable term for it is Signature Bridge. This one could have been the talk of the continent, or at least the mid-continent. Or it might have been a gem on the order of the elegant new bridge across the mighty Mississippi at Lake Village--a thing of use and of beauty, too. Instead of just another of the Highway Department's ordinary designs.

Why not erect a landmark that would attract the kind of rave reviews the old Broadway Bridge got when it was built circa 1923?

What we have here is a sad example of what the economists call opportunity cost, in this case the cost of building a mediocre new bridge, and so losing an opportunity. In this case, an opportunity to achieve something great. The saddest words of tongue or pen remain: What Might Have Been.

Why must we in Arkansas build only for the present and not the future, or even in the best tradition of the the past, like the Broadway Bridge in all its original, Roaring Twenties glory? What we have here isn't just a deficit in dollars, but in imagination and innovation. That deficit may be the more serious one.

As a great city planner named Daniel Burnham once advised, "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work." And bridges.

Congratulations to Massman Construction, the nationally respected bridge-builders out of Kansas City (a city with any number of wide boulevards, sweeping vistas and graceful bridges) on its winning this contract, its latest of many. Massman will doubtless will do a fine job of building this new bridge and staying within budget. What a pity such fine folks couldn't be building a great bridge, one worthy of their talent and experience, instead of . . . just another forgettable bridge.

What'll the new bridge be called--the same as the old, the Broadway Bridge? A more fitting name might be the Bridge of Lost Opportunity.

Editorial on 09/23/2014

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