Sam Houston Ship Channel Bridge

Sam Houston Ship Channel Bridge
Convicted	Sam Houston Tollway
Crossing of	Houston Ship Channel
place	at Houston
construction	Prestressed concrete bridge
overall length	457 m (3200 m)
width	18 m
Longest span	229 m
Clear height	53 m
start of building	1980
completion	1982
planner	HNTB, Figg & Muller
toll	EZ DAY
	location

29.73575 -95.145944444444Coordinates: 29 ° 44 ′ 9 ″ N , 95 ° 8 ′ 45 ″ W.

The Sam Houston Ship Channel Bridge spans the Houston Ship Channel in Harris County , Texas , USA . It is the most important part of the Sam Houston Tollway , the eastern section of Beltway 8 , a motorway-like ring road around Houston , and is therefore often only called Beltway 8 Bridge in the population .

It has a headroom of 53.3 m (175 ft ) over a width of 152.4 m (500 ft). This makes it significantly higher than the Sidney Sherman Bridge , which is closer to Houston and 9 years older , which still has the measure of 135 ft (41.15 m) first used in New York City , and almost as high as the 178 ft high Fred Hartman Bridge (1995) further east.

The 3.2 km long structure including the ramp bridges is located in an industrial area; the northern, almost 914 m long driveway is next to a marshalling yard, the southern, 1829 m (6000 ft) long access bridge leads over tank facilities, pipelines, roads and railroad tracks.

At the planning stage, provisions were already made for a future second parallel bridge.

The area sank by more than 2 m between 1943 and 1973 when water was pumped from 60 to 114 m depth. Further reductions to be expected had to be taken into account in the planning.

The bridge was designed by Howard Needles Tammen & Bergendorff (HNTB); Figg & Muller Engineers were responsible for the changes to the superstructure initiated by the contractor. Construction began in 1980 and was completed in May 1982.

The actual bridge is a 457.2 m (1500 ft) long and 18 m wide prestressed concrete bridge with a 228.6 m (750 ft) wide main opening and two 114.3 m (375 ft) wide secondary openings. She was one of the first in Texas cantilever built prestressed concrete bridges in the United States, if one of the Cable Bridge aside, a proposal of Fritz Leonhardt built 1978 cable-stayed bridge . The Pine Valley Creek Bridge in California, which opened in 1975, was overlooked.

It has a haunched , two-cell box girder with a trapezoidal cross-section. Its overall height of 13.10 m decreases to 3.66 m at the end of the cantilever arm.

Its reinforced concrete - pillars also have a hollow cross section.

The ramp bridges consist of standardized, prefabricated prestressed concrete beam girders with a length of 28.6 m (94 ft) or 36.6 m (120 ft), which are placed on yokes with a cross strut and two slim stems and covered with a thin slab of in-situ concrete are.

The toll is only by the usual in Houston electronic toll collection system since 2016 EZ TAG levied.

In 2018, the construction of the second bridge that was planned from the beginning began. A 4-lane carriageway for the cable-stayed bridge is to be completed in 2021, the other, which will replace the current bridge, is to be opened in 2024.

literature

Stephen B. Quinn, M. Jack Kopetz: Design and Construction of the Houston Ship Channel Bridge. In: PCI Journal (published by the Precast / Prestressed Concrete Institute ), Volume 27, Issue 3, May / June 1982, pp. 30–57 (pp. 1–28 in PDF; 4.1 MB)

Individual evidence

↑ Stephen B. Quinn, M. Jack Kopetz: Design and Construction of the Houston Ship Channel Bridge. In: PCI Journal (published by the Precast / Prestressed Concrete Institute ), Volume 27, Issue 3, May / June 1982, p. 38 (p. 9 in PDF; 4.1 MB)
↑ The Brooklyn Bridge and after it the Williamsburg Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge all had a clearance height of 135 ft, only the George Washington Bridge (1931) and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge had openings 65 m and more high.
^ Reggie Holt, Lian Duan: Bridge Engineering in the United States: Pine Valley Creek Bridge . In: Wai-Fah Chen, Lian Duan (Eds.): Handbook of International Bridge Engineering . CRC Press, Boca Raton 2014, ISBN 1-4398-1029-X , pp. 65 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
↑ Sam Houston Tollway Ship Channel Bridge at shipchannelbridge.org

[1] Stephen B. Quinn, M. Jack Kopetz: Design and Construction of the Houston Ship Channel Bridge. In: PCI Journal (published by the Precast / Prestressed Concrete Institute ), Volume 27, Issue 3, May / June 1982, p. 38 (p. 9 in PDF; 4.1 MB)

[2] The Brooklyn Bridge and after it the Williamsburg Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge all had a clearance height of 135 ft, only the George Washington Bridge (1931) and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge had openings 65 m and more high.

[3] Reggie Holt, Lian Duan: Bridge Engineering in the United States: Pine Valley Creek Bridge . In: Wai-Fah Chen, Lian Duan (Eds.): Handbook of International Bridge Engineering . CRC Press, Boca Raton 2014, ISBN 1-4398-1029-X , pp. 65 ( limited preview in Google Book search).

[4] Sam Houston Tollway Ship Channel Bridge at shipchannelbridge.org