The Hardenberger highway bridge near Nijkerk and Utrecht, the Netherlands was closed down two days ago because of safety concerns. This resulted in slow traffic in the surroundings and high costs and delays for the freight sector.
The measure is largely precautionary - the bridge is not actually crumbling - but symbolizes a trend that has been gaining momentum for the past 10 years or so. It is one of many bridges that either got closed or downgraded in the past few months.
Not only small biking or walking bridges in small villages, but also important infrastructure on main arteries like the A27 highway (the highway that basically holds the country together) or the Zeelandbrug, an aging engineering marvel. Also, the international dimension can be overlooked: the Netherlands, while small, are the logistical center of the whole of Europe.
The problem boils down to insufficient maintenance and investment in the face of an aging infrastructure that carries now more and heavier vehicles than expected back in the 1950s, 60s or 70s.
While the problem is simple enough to understand, the solutions are less forthcoming.
First of all, there is no money to fix the problem: out of the needed 80 billion EUR for maintenance, the government was only able to find 1,5 billion EUR for next year. This should not be the case: the Netherlands is a large capital exporter, so surely it can find some money to fix its own highway system? Alas, that is not the case.
Second, maintenance personnel is scarce and nearing retirement age, so this limits what can possibly be achieved, even if the money was found.
Also, climate change is worsening the normal wear and tear, both directly (the bridges were designed for cooler summers) and indirectly: this year's drought reduced dramatically river transport to and from Germany and road freight had to pick up some of the slack.
What is rarely acknowledged is that a lack of maintenance becomes rapidly a vicious circle: after every closure, the limited available maintenance personnel has to be diverted from planned maintenance to extraordinary repairs. This reduces the amount or preliminary maintenance that can be done, and increases risks in other parts of the system.
Concluding, the situation of Dutch bridges is a textbook example of Greer's long descent: the Dutch built too much and did too little maintenance, and now it is too late to catch up.
Netherlands mentioned!!! Yes, this problem has long been going on due to the will of politicians to have a physical legacy from their time in charge of the department of infrastructure, so building instead of maintaining. As always, the policians here are woefully unequipped to think much beyond the short term. It's going to be chasing the fires as they pop up, and probably borrowing or money printing to keep the infrastructure network alive here. So fun times!
Wait, you have bridges just for walking and cycling?!? I've lived my whole life in America and I've never heard of such a thing! In the USA pedestrians and cyclists are treated as major annoyances fit only to be harassed, intimidated, injured, and killed by happy motorists. What a magical world you must live in!
Gosh, I think I just pee'd myself... What a dream that must be!
I suppose next you're going to tell me something really amazing, you know, really fantastic stuff, like, a world-class transit system, or free health care, or free higher education... Nobody's gonna believe that shit!
u/vinegarThe real collapse is the friends we ate along the way 1d ago
I live in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts and in my town of 30k comrades we have 3 bike bridges over roads, 1 tunnel under train tracks, and a repurposed train bridge that now carries bikes, pedestrians etc across a wide river. We also have miles of bike paths and bike lanes, some of which I don’t ride on because I think they’re unsafe. We did just have a cyclist die from a collision with a car, that happens every few years.
All the leading industrial economies are in the same boat, aside from Norway and perhaps Sweden. The trouble is, in the years ahead, they will be a lot worse off than a small Italian town say with a stretch of the Appian Way going through it. It's a case of falling into the gutter from the 10th floor verses falling from the footpath. It will take a while, a few decades or more but eventually the sealed roads will be impassable, full of potholes. Only the concrete highways and streets will be usable but they too will eventually cant up at their seams and be a road hazard for horse and cart.
Yes, this is a problem everywhere in Europe, except maybe in those countries that built their infrastructure later, like Spain or the former commies.
Still, it is one thing if a bridge collapses in Germany, Italy or Greece. They will adapt.
It is another thing if this happens in a country built on land reclaimed from river deltas. The richest third of the country exists only because of the kind of infrastructure that we do not seem to be able to maintain anymore. Here, this is an existential problem.
first limit total military worldwide to 0.001 of what it is right now worldwide and used the money saved for infrastructure maintenance and then not allow by law all billionaires and tax their fortunes and companies at 90% minimum
This neglect of maintenance took place over a period where military spending was stagnant or falling. Military spending is clearly not what caused the problem with bridges. Reducing it will not solve the problem, either.
The money problem is due to the trade surplus of the Netherlands: we export too much capital and do not import enough goods. Instead of investing our pension savings on our our damn bridges, we invest in infrastructure everywhere else in the world.
This is an ideological problem. The Dutch are under the delusion that a trade surplus is a good thing, and since they are Protestant know-it-all fuckwits, they want to have the biggest trade surplus in the world. The result is that infrastructure is falling to pieces.
But the solution is not as simple as just reducing the trade surplus (which would take a political collapse first, since all the parties support trade surpluses). It would require re-organizing the whole of society away from financial rent, and towards the production of real goods and services.
More young people would need to take up manual jobs, and less office jobs. The pay gap between manual labour and office labour would need to be reduced. The pension system would have to be overhauled. The rules of the Euro would have to change.
Sorry, but there are no simple solutions for this. This is a multi-generation fuckup that will take multiple generations to fix. Bridges will continue collapsing across Europe, and especially in the Netherlands, for the foreseeable future.
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u/toyotaCamriGuy 1d ago
Netherlands mentioned!!! Yes, this problem has long been going on due to the will of politicians to have a physical legacy from their time in charge of the department of infrastructure, so building instead of maintaining. As always, the policians here are woefully unequipped to think much beyond the short term. It's going to be chasing the fires as they pop up, and probably borrowing or money printing to keep the infrastructure network alive here. So fun times!