Tappan Zee Bridge The Worst? New York’s Replacement Construction Like A Slow-Moving Accident


Built in 1955, the Tappan Zee Bridge was originally designed to last only 50 years, and it’s slowly coming up on its 60th anniversary. The Tappan Zee Bridge once had President Obama remarking, “At times, you can see the river through the cracks in the pavement. Now, I’m not an engineer, but I figure that’s not good.” Needless to say, everyone wants the new NY bridge to be finished, but even that seems like watching a slow-moving accident.

In a related report by the Inquisitr, the Tappan Zee dangler suspended himself by a rope beneath the bridge in order to draw attention to alleged corruption.

President Obama is not the only critic of the Tappan Zee Bridge. According to Jalopnik, a governor’s aide once referred to it as the “hold-your-breath bridge.”

“It’s hideous design is also ‘fracture critical,’ meaning that there aren’t many redundancies built in if something goes wrong. And nothing possibly could go wrong, right? I mean it’s not like it’s a major target for terrorism, it straddles a busy maritime lane, and it sits atop an active fault line.”

To top it off, the new Tappan Zee Bridge replacement will not be ready until 2018 at the earliest, will cost around $3.9 billion, and even then the new design will include any mass transit options. Instead of a suspension bridge, engineers are putting together a cable-stayed bridge, and the construction company hopes it will last for 100 years. Cable-stayed bridges are becoming quite common in the United States, although this newer design will be a first for New York state.

Unfortunately, the New York State Thruway Authority, which is in charge of the new Tappan Zee Bridge construction project, was hit by scandal earlier in the month. According to the NY Post, two top executives submitted their resignations before a scathing investigative report on the agency’s operations could be released. Among those findings was frivolous spending on staff dinners in addition to passing a budget that would require a toll hike.

The good news is that Governor Andrew Cuomo is attempting to avoid those plans for a toll increase.

“We’re going to continue upgrading our infrastructure statewide,” Cuomo claims, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal.

“We’re going to invest in the Thruway to keep the tolls constant on the Thruway so there won’t be a toll increase because we want that traffic and we want that traffic to continue. And we’ll also be investing in the construction of the Tappan Zee Bridge to keep that toll down when the new bridge is constructed.”

According to Lohud, many people favor naming the new Tapan Zee Bridge after Mario Cuomo, New York’s former governor, or Pete Seeger, the famed Hudson Valley folk singer, but others are less generous with their ideas and prefer something like “boondoggle” or the Tappan Zee Memorial Bridge, since it’s a memorial to itself.

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