Brent, Meet Sherman

Obama campaigns at the Brent Spence Bridge on the Ohio River at Cincinnati.

What they’re not telling you is that a replacement is already in the Ohio/Kentucky/Federal DOT program, though construction won’t start until 2015 and finish by 2022 at the earliest.  The most any sudden infusion of Federal money could do is to get it started next spring.

If Obama is worried about failing bridges, he should have been more than a hundred miles down river.  The Sherman Minton bridge, which, like the Brent Spence Bridge, is a double decker interstate highway bridge over the Ohio River that goes between a central business district on one side of the river in one state to residential suburbs on the other side of the river in the other state, not to mention the inter-city traffic, is closed as I write these words, and might not re-open, on account of support beam cracks.

At least the Brent Spence Bridge is mostly healthy from a structural standpoint.  Its problem is that it has two few lanes for the traffic it handles.

If the Sherman Minton Bridge is closed for good, this means that its replacement has to go at or near the top of the list, pushing everything else back.  At the same time, Louisville needs a new Ohio crossing east of town, and ideally needs to replace the John F. Kennedy (Interstate 65) bridge.  I’m thinking that the problems with the Sherman Minton Bridge have helped 86-64’s cause a lot.

UPDATE 9/23:  Turns out that replacing the Brent Spence Bridge is a far bigger deal than just replacing the bridge.  It will also involve reconstructing the two interstate routes that lead to it on both sides of the river in both Ohio and Kentucky.