Isn't that basically arguing "Don't talk to me about statistics, I want to talk about this one specific data point"?
Bridges on the whole are pretty clearly better built and safer today then they were 130 years ago. I don't think there's any significant argument to the contrary. There are outliers in both directions, obviously. The old one at this site looks like it was pretty great. The new one sucked. That doesn't say much about why that was true, just that it was.
> On the whole they may be better built, but the same design in steel would likely not have failed?
I don't see how that follows? Lots of steel bridges have failed over the past 130 years. The overwhelming majority of new-built bridges or any material don't fail.
People really, really want this to be about "aesthetics" because it confirms their priors about being smarter than the rest of the world or whatever. I'm just saying that's 100% bunk and that there's zero evidence for that hypothesis.
Architecture has had a "strong focus on aesthetics" since the very first stones were piled up to make a temple. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
> Isn't that basically arguing "Don't talk to me about statistics, I want to talk about this one specific data point"?
And why not? In this particular case, the statistics did not justify the expectation that this bridge would be at least as robust as the one it replaced.
There's a general point to be made about engineering progress, but here we have a case which bucks the trend. Speaking in generalities when the topic is a specific incident is a way of missing the point.
Bridges on the whole are pretty clearly better built and safer today then they were 130 years ago. I don't think there's any significant argument to the contrary. There are outliers in both directions, obviously. The old one at this site looks like it was pretty great. The new one sucked. That doesn't say much about why that was true, just that it was.