Comments on: Caltrans’ finest hour?

By: Bruce De Benedictis

Bruce De Benedictis — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:31:23 +0000

I do not think that the area where the accident occurred changed at all after 1989. The truck was traveling from the bridge to 580, which was not affected.

I doubt we will ever know what happened. There have been a lot of people who claimed that the truck was speeding, but trucks do not normally speed at the highest point of an overpass.

No doubt the cost of the repairs will not be charged as an operating expense of the roads. It will become one more ignored cost when it comes to “proving” that drivers pay more than what they cost, no matter how little they pay.

By: Reedman

Reedman — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:39:08 +0000

Maybe my memory is failing me*, but I remember
the pre-earthquake, pre-1989, Cypress connector
from 880 to 80 to be easier to maneuver than the
present implementation. The residents of West Oakland
renamed Cypress to Nelson Mandela, and Caltrans
folded like a cheap suit to pressure to re-route
880 around the previous right-of-way. Perhaps one
contributing factor to the crash was that the
Maze is not as easy to get through as it could be.

* as you get older, memory is the second thing to
go. I don’t remember what the first is…

By: Capricious Commuter

Capricious Commuter — Mon, 07 May 2007 22:54:24 +0000

While I hate to sound like a shill for Caltrans, I should point out that the contractor stands to make as much as $5 million in bonuses for finishing early, as I note in my next post. If Caltrans ends up getting this baby for 867k, the taxpayers will be getting the deal of the century.

By: DURAL

DURAL — Mon, 07 May 2007 21:47:26 +0000

CAL TRANS FINEST HOUR??

Looks like it is more like CAL TRANS finest hour of thievery. I just read that the lowest bidder for reconstruction of the destroyed section is around 800 thousand dollars but so far CALTRANS says it has spent “$14.3 million so far to repair the freeway, including $4.3 in demolition costs, $8 million for shoring it up and testing it and $2 million for traffic management,” as reported in an SF Gate article on May 7,07. In addition they are offering 200 thousand dollars per day as bonus for finishing early. What kind of joke is this to the tax payers?? Is CAL TRANS following Halliburton standards in Iraq ??