Orphan Road

The final price tag for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is $735 million, $114M under budget. The new Evergreen Point bridge will cost almost six times that much. Now, clearly all bridges are not created equal, but surely this disparity warrants further investigation. How did this project go so well?

Certainly one advantage was the design-build contract with Kiewit and Bechtel, which shaved two years off the process and committed the contractors to delivering a new bridge at a fixed cost.

However, the cost doesn't include finance charges. The legislature floated an $800M bond, and we'll be paying that off over the next 23 years -- plus interest -- with tolls. By contrast, a good chunk of the $4.4B cost of the new 520 bridge is the finance charges. If the proposed Lake Washington tolls do bring in the $2B or so that WSDOT expects they will, then the real cost of the 520 bridge is more like $2.4B, if we're comparing apples to apples (or bridges to bridges).

Nonetheless, even with Frank Chopp's last-minute effort to re-do the finance plan (which either saved us money or cost us money, it's not entirely clear to me) the Tacoma Narrows Bridge seems to be a runaway transporation success story in a region with too few of those.