No One Crosses the Bridge Unbuilt

The bridge would be glorious when complete. It would be longer than San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge connecting to Manhattan. As all good things cost dearly, the project’s price tag was a whopping $398 million.

The only hitch in the plan was that this bridge would connect an islet with only 50 inhabitants.

In 2005, the bridge to connect a small Alaskan urbanization to its airport was a hotly debated project of public infrastructure. Critics dubbed the project the “Bridge to Nowhere.” Opposition grew fierce enough that ultimately the project was scrapped. Twenty years later, locals wonder whether the correct decision was reached about the bridge. More broadly, people wonder whether infrastructure anywhere can ever be a bad investment.

Desire versus Necessity

Alaska is the USA’s northernmost state and its biggest by geographic distension. Yet it ranks antepenultimate (48th) in smallest population, which in the year 2000 was 627,000 residents. (p. 27, table 1) This amounted in the same year to a population density of 1.1 persons per square mile (2.59 km²), which means that Alaska sends only one representative to Congress. In 2005, that was Don Young.

Young had been born in California but in the late 1950s moved to Alaska, lured by Jack London’s accounts of the place in his novels. Young worked his way through both chambers of Alaska’s legislature, and in a special election became the state’s sole U.S. Representative in 1973, a position he would hold until his death in 2022 (25 terms). In 2005, he chaired the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure and wanted to make the most of it by bringing home some prime pork.

Capitalizing on several state and federal infrastructural allocations, like 1997’s Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (Public Law 105-178), Young decided on a bridge to connect the city of Ketchikan (population 11,000) to its insular airport. Ketchikan itself sits on Revillagigedo Island in southeastern Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago. Young’s project would in fact consist of two bridges; one to connect Revillagigedo and Pennock Island, and the other to connect Pennock to Gravina Island (population 50), where Ketchikan Airport (KTN) is. The Pennock-Gravina bridge would run 820 meters at an elevation of 49 meters, whilst the Revillagigedo-Pennock bridge to the east would run 1,100 meters long at an elevation of 76 meters. The eastern bridge’s higher elevation would allow the navigation of tall cruise ships through the Tongass Narrows since tourism is essential to Alaska’s economy.

Representative Young and other supporters of this project – like Sarah Palin, then on campaign for Governor of Alaska – downplayed the ambitious project’s costs. Even their conservative estimates put the price at $315 million. Opponents estimated a more honest reckoning at $398 million. Either way, two realizations were certain. Firstly, this funding had to come from the national government since Alaska could not afford it. Secondly, despite the national government’s largess, the project would impose significant and ongoing unfunded mandates on the state and borough (Alaska’s term for county) of Ketchikan Gateway.

The first realization was ironic given Representative Young’s affiliation as a Republican. The Republican Party presents itself as the champion of “fiscal conservatism” but in practice is anything but. Then as now, Republicans controlled both the presidency and the Congress, yet they engaged in rampant deficit spending just like their Democrat counterparts… no less than they do nowadays. The plain fact remains that Alaska is a net taker state, meaning that it receives more benefits from the national government than it pays in taxes. (¶ 3-4) Though no one asserts that Alaska should get nothing for its residents’ contributions in federal taxation, the proposal of such an expensive project to be funded by the national government – which in practice means every citizen outside Alaska – galvanized opposition to the project.

The second realization was subtler and lurked in the details. The Gravina Access Project (the project’s official name) would annually accumulate $270,000 in operative expenses for the two bridges beyond what funding reasonable tolls could generate. Since you cannot just plop a bridge down in the middle of nowhere, the Gravina Access Project also required the construction and maintenance of 5.15 kilometers of connective roadway. With motorists now able to drive directly to KTN, a garage needed to be constructed at $11 million and maintained at an estimated annual cost of $120,000. The funding arrangements required Ketchikan Gateway Borough (KGB) to match federal allocations by $23 million. These unfunded mandates greatly concerned locals given that KGB could not even afford to plow the snow from ancillary roads during the harsh winter of 2002-2003.

Undaunted by these consequences, Rep. Young zealously promoted the project. In 2001, the U.S. Forestry Service had proposed a sale on Gravina Island’s timber. To accomplish the timber’s removal, the logging lobby wanted to bilk federal taxpayers to fund the project rather than absorb itself the costs of the timber’s removal by barge. Against objections that increased logging in the Tongass would discourage the tourism which the Gravina Access Project purported to foment, the logging lobby found a ready friend in Rep. Young, so he redoubled his efforts to whip votes for the project.

Notwithstanding the zeal of Young and Palin for the Gravina Access Project, all this was just to bypass the current method of reaching KTN, which is by ferry. Every 30 minutes a ferry transports passengers at $6 apiece and vehicles at $7 per car to Ketchikan City. The crossing only takes 7 minutes. In 2005, KTN was Alaska’s fifth busiest airport. As a non-hub airport, it handles mostly commercial flights and registered 110,211 enplanements in that year. By way of comparison, the minor, non-hub Long Island Douglas MacArthur (ISP) airport in Islip NY, registered 1,055,832 enplanements for the same year. Insofar as the Gravina Access Project was to facilitate passengers’ transportation through KTN, this would amount to American taxpayers subsidizing every trip through KTN at $3,611 based on 2005’s volume of travel.

The Gravina Island Bridge, however, proved a bridge too far. By November 2005, adverse publicity about the project’s exorbitant costs induced Rep. Young to release the federal earmark for the bridge, as well as another bridge which he had wanted to construct over the Knik Arm waterway in Anchorage AK. By 2007, Governor Palin admitted that Alaska unaided could not fund these projects, so the proposals were permanently shelved.

No One Crosses the Bridge Unbuilt

Twenty years since the Gravina Access Project foundered in Congress, KGB’s residents still wonder about what could have been. Though commuting to and from KTN entails little inconvenience in optimal conditions, such conditions never last.

The ferry is presently Ketchikan’s only lifeline to and from its airport. The ferry line came into existence 52 years ago when KTN was inaugurated, and it is subject to the vagaries of weather and mechanics. More predictably, the ferry line confronts an impending financial complication in that the line operates two vessels, one of which soon approaches the duration of thirty years after which the manufacturer suggests replacement. Replacement with a modern vessel will run $32 million, which KGB does not have liquid, especially after recent renovations to KTN. At fares of $6 and $7 dollars each way, the ferry line annually operates at a net loss of $700,000, and KGB shoulders the shortfall. (¶ 25-26) This means that federal subsidy may be needed after all to acquire a new vessel, just to preserve the status quo.

All this has led various regional stakeholders to revisit the idea of the Gravina Access Project, though with a modern twist. Instead of ravaging the Tongass’ landscape and fjords – which millions of tourists come to visit every year – with a grandiose pair of bridges as Rep. Young had conceived, KGB now pitches the Ketchikan Airport Access Tunnel (KAAT) to trillionaire Elon Musk’s Boring Company.

In 2022, this tunnelling company – which puns on its Chunnel-strength industrial drills which bore through the earth for the creation of subsurface passageways – opened the first branch of the Vegas Loop. By way of this network of subterranean tunnels, commuters in automated Teslas can bypass the heavy traffic in Las Vegas NV. KGB now hopes the Boring Company can solve KTN’s inaccessibility by connecting it via a pair of underwater tunnels. Just as Rep. Young’s plan had proposed, this system may follow the Revillagigedo-Pennock then Pennock-Gravina route, or it may connect at a quarry called Wolf Point in northwestern Ketchikan, which would utilize only one tunnel.

Underwater tunnelling is nothing new, but nor is it yet commonplace. In 1937, the first tube of the Lincoln Tunnel was inaugurated, which connected Manhattan to Weehawken NJ beneath the Hudson River. In 1964, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel opened, which transports millions beneath the storied Chesapeake River and is being expanded. Since then, several major and minor underwater tunnels have been constructed in the USA for cars, subways and railroads, but one country which has become quite good at this infrastructure, and that is Norway.

Over the last 40 years, Norway has constructed 33 undersea tunnels, is the in process of constructing another, with another 8 planned in the near future. Like Alaska, Norway consists of a mainland and many islets (239,057 to be exact!), so resort to undersea tunnels is aesthetically preferable rather than dotting the waterscapes with bridges. In fact, Alaska and Norway share a northerly glacial landscape, which may mean that the KAAT finds success comparable to what Norway has seen for this infrastructure in the last four decades.

Reconsideration of the Gravina Access Project comes twenty years late, but hopefully different wisdom prevails this time around. The price tag of $398 million was admittedly daunting, but look at the resultant expenditures in the 2000 aughts. The U.S. military during the self-styled “War on Terror” splurged over $3 trillion unleashing “shock and awe” on Iraq to obliterate the country’s modern civilian infrastructure, only afterwards to spend $20.9 billion re-building it. If anything, the USA could have saved a few steps! The ineffable tragedy is that twenty years ago our country scoffed at Rep. Young’s proposal due to its high cost yet funnelled trillions into the military-industrial complex for armaments of one-time use abroad. Now we play catch up to modernize our stagnated and depreciated infrastructure.

A Bridge to Nowhere Makes It Somewhere

Of all the harm government can cause, public infrastructure’s construction and maintenance are amongst modern government’s more useful functions. Though infrastructure privately financed, constructed and maintained is always preferable, governmental development of infrastructure can improve the public weal within certain limits.

If infrastructure is proposed to address clear and current public necessity, then there is a good chance that it will redound to proportional societal benefit. This may manifest as a culvert which must be constructed to prevent periodic flash flooding known to damage homes in an area. This could also be priority public loans to a private medical group seeking to establish a new hospital in an underserved area, since maybe residents have suffered death or complications during long commutes to the nearest alternative. It is certainly not New York State’s corporatist gift in 2026 of the Highmark Stadium to the billionaire Buffalo Bills football team, no matter how happy it may make the constituency of those fans!

Another imperative is the absence of private entities willing and able to construct the infrastructure within the desired schedule. In 1843, Congress preempted inquiry into private finance of telegraphic cables by allocating $30,000 to their installation. Luckily Samuel Morse’s incipient technology withstood time’s test and was in use for another hundred years, but had it been rendered obsolete by another invention shortly thereafter, Congress would have wagered $1.36 million in inflation-adjusted dollars on a boondoggle! This is why private finance in infrastructure – with consequent private benefit – is always preferable.

Of course, infrastructure by its durable nature predisposes public planners to futurism. Thus, some public works anticipate conditions not then existent. A cautionary example of such public works is China’s “ghost cities” built at breakneck speed in anticipation of population and commerce. It may be that years hence the conditions which these ghost-cities anticipate finally materialize, but in the interim, public planners have siphoned the productive citizenry’s presently needed resources for infrastructure addressing needs which may never manifest. It is a gamble with other people’s money, which is why infrastructure works best if limited to clear and current public necessity.

Restricted to this necessity, public infrastructure may address obvious demand in its early stages. This is the airstrip constructed adjacent a budding township, or the pier built at the nascent fishing village. Societal investment into infrastructure has a curious way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy which eventually turns nowhere into somewhere.