Lol who told you that. Engineering in Canada is essentially cultism.

Also here where I live (Edmonton) — the contractors had to rebuild the bridge because even before they finished building it, it became bent.

During the latest election season a funny line came up during the debates:

“Our friends to the south are sending rockets into space, and we’re still trying to figure out how to build bridges”

As I typed that I also just remember a piece of news about our new LRT line. The new “high tech” signaling system is essentially broken, forcing the train operators to run in “visual identification mode” —- meaning half the speed so they can stop if they see something on the tracks. There is a lawsuit, and the company has until December to fix it. The line has been open for about 2 years now.

I mean, our bridges in the US are not necessarily great. From the Tacoma Narrows bridge to the I-35W bridge... sometimes they collapse.

In MN, since the I-35W went down, I’d go so far as to categorize the bridges that have gone up as appearing “overbuilt”. Which is probably a good thing. It at least appears to me like they’re taking bridge safety seriously. Inspection of existing bridges kicked up strongly, and Dailing bridge inspections make the news.

Narrows was almost a century ago, and taught bridge builders to consider airflow. The more recent I-5 bridge collapse was because a truck was too tall and collided with bridge supports.

Or perhaps: because designers failed to take into account the possibility that someone would drive a too tall trck over the bridge?

I'm not a bridge engineer, but I'm pretty sure that height requirements are there for a reason. In fact, I looked at this incident last week, and it seemed that there was a different maximum height depending on which lane you were in, but that was ignored/not acted on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-5_Skagit_River_Bridge_collap...

The vertical clearance from the roadway to the upper arched beam in the outer lane is 14 feet 7 inches (4.45 m), and all trucks with oversize loads are expected to travel in the inside lane where the clearance is around 17 feet (5.2 m). The oversize truck instead entered the bridge in the outer lane, while a second semi-truck and a BMW were passing it in the inner lane. ... A pilot car was hired to ensure the load could pass safely. The pilot car never signalled the truck driver that there would be a problem crossing the Skagit bridge and did not warn the trucker to use an inside lane.