Bridge

I read with interest your article about the innovative method that will be employed to install the new bridge at West Nursery Road and Baltimore-Washington Parkway over the weekends of Oct. 19 and Oct. 26 ("Rolling out better access to the airport - at 4 mph," Oct. 11). I applaud the State Highway Administration for choosing such a minimally disruptive means to replace an aging bridge. These weekends were chosen because there are no Ravens game scheduled. But who would have guessed that the Orioles could be hosting a World Series game Oct. 27?

Over the last two weekends of October, highway crews will replace two bridges over the Baltimore-Washington Parkway that serve the airport and hotel district by rolling the old ones out and rolling the new ones in. The "bridge on wheels" swap, used in other states but making its debut in Maryland, saves time and money, reduces traffic disruptions and cuts the potential for work-zone accidents, State Highway Administration officials said. "We looked at traditional methods and with the traffic level there, closing the bridges wasn't an option for an extended period," said Jeff Robert, a state project engineer.

From time to time, two competing technologies exist in parallel situations for an extended period prior to one dominating, and supplanting, the other. Back in the tape age, there was a great debate among tech heads as to whether Beta or VHS was the better format for videotape. For a while, both were available at Blockbuster and other video stores. Beta supposedly had superior sound quality and equally good picture quality, and the tape cassettes were smaller, so that style of videotape had a loyal following.

In the far corners of Maryland, cars from Harford County, especially eastern Harford County, as well as Cecil County (the western parts, notably) can be picked out in any crowded parking lot. They're the ones that have the large grocery store-style bar code stickers affixed to their drivers' sides. In some cases, half a dozen or more stickers are visible; other folks are more judicious and placed new stickers over the old ones. The stickers made possible unlimited crossings of the Route 40 bridge over the Susquehanna River.

Planned bridge construction that has one lane of Route 50 west closed in Queenstown caused a 12-mile traffic backup Sunday afternoon, according to the State Highway Administration. The backup stretched from the bridge over Route 301 in Queenstown to just before Old Skipton Road in the Cordova area, according to Charlie Gischlar, a SHA spokesman. "That's a pretty major backup," he said. Gischlar suggested drivers take Route 213 to Route 301 to avoid the backup. The construction began last week to replace the driving surface on the bridge, which has been patched many times but finally needed to be completely replaced, Gischlar said.

Saint Clair Bridge Road in northern Harford County has been re-opened to traffic, the Harford County Department of Public Works announced Friday. The road had been closed since mid-June 2011 to allow for repairs to the bridge. For further information regarding this highway project, contact the Department of Public Works, Bureau of Construction Inspection, Monday through Friday during normal business hours, 410-638-3217, Ext. 2442.

A New York investment firm has given a $12.5 million short-term loan to the owner of an Arbutus industrial building to "stabilize the property for the longer term," according to one of the firm's managing directors. "Like many owners of Class-B and Class-C assets in the nation's middle markets, this sponsor needed a competitively priced, non-recourse bridge loan," said Geoffrey Smith, of Hudson Realty Capital Inc., in a statement Thursday. Hudson loaned the money for upkeep of a 689,000 square foot building in Arbutus on a 34-acre industrial site that currently houses a "prominent manufacturing company, mechanical contractor, logistics company and wholesaler of natural stone products," the statement said.

Thunderstorms moving across Maryland on Saturday afternoon cut power to more than 20,000 Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. customers and prompted closures on the Bay Bridge. Anne Arundel and Prince George's counties, where the National Weather Service issued tornado warnings during the late afternoon, suffered the most outages. BGE spokesman Rob Gould said the southern part of the company's coverage area "clearly took the brunt of it. " Gould said high winds seemed to be the chief culprit.

A few years ago, it was fashionable for Democratsto describe themselves as "members of the reality-based community. " These days, it seems the foreclosure crisis has hit them so hard they've been forced to move to another neighborhood. Metaphorically, at least, they've set up a refugee camp in Charlotte this week. In this political Brigadoon, things are going well in America, so well in fact that President Barack Obama obviously deserves a second term because Americans are better off than they were four years ago, and that the Republican Party is little more than a haven for old-fashioned robber barons who think like Klansmen but dress like Mr. Monopoly.

Given the rancorous tone of current public debate and the gridlock in government, college students are understandably skeptical about politics and public life. Our polarized legislators seem unable to discuss issues with civility, and policy only seems to be made when one party has a supermajority and compromise is unnecessary. This pessimistic view may be the received wisdom, but we see reasons for hope on many college campuses. At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, students are helping lead the way to a new kind of politics that bridges difference and strengthens communities.