Bridge Maintenance in New York City

The Bridge Division of the New York City Department of Transportation was established in 1988. The Bridge Division oversees the expenditure of billions of dollars from public funding sources (federal, state, and local) for the rehabilitation of the nearly 800 city bridges, including the landmark East River crossings (Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Queens-borough), and a number of critically important movable bridges (Third Avenue, Willis Avenue, and 145th Street). At the time the Bridge Division was established, a concentrated effort was made to determine the needs of the bridge network for systematic preventive maintenance. Optimizing the expenditures allocated to these two fundamental bridge engineering activities has shown them to be complementary and competitive as primary methods in management of transportation networks. This paper reviews the progress of bridge management thinking and practices as they followed the similarly complementary and competitive top-down and ground-up paths, at the network and project levels, respectively, up to the present.