Bridge Safety Assurance Measures Taken in New York State

A description of New York State’s Bridge Safety Assurance (BSA) Program is given, and specific examples of interim countermeasures that can be taken to lessen the risk of failure due to hydraulic scour, overload, steel details, collision, concrete details, and earthquakes are provided. The BSA program was adopted to provide a systematic means of identifying situations that pose a threat to the structural integrity of bridges. A traditional bridge inspection program ascertains the condition of various bridge elements. This information is typically used to drive an agency’s capital and maintenance bridge programs. New York’s BSA program supplements this condition-based evaluation by taking a slightly different perspective. It assesses and rates the degree of risk that is associated with certain design details and circumstances. The program is used to evaluate a bridge by using current design practice as a reference, whereas the inspection procedures are used to rate each element of a bridge only according to its condition and ability to function as intended in the original design. Rating all bridges according to their ability to remain safe under current conditions by using today’s design philosophy provides an ability to evaluate structures by using a common reference regardless of when they were built. Specific examples of retrofit work that has been undertaken as a result of the adoption of New York’s BSA policy in 1992 are given.