Pittsburgh allegedly has more bridges than any other city in the world. One collapsed last January.[0] I had driven over and walked under it many times. An uncomfortable number of other bridges in the city are in poor repair.[1] If one of the bigger ones over one of the rivers here collapse, it will be a tragedy of similar magnitude to your nightmare.
Ya but the bigger the bridge the better the monitoring. I used to use one that fell daily, but its not a bridge your average Yinzer crosses even on a yearly basis.
It just doesn't really go anywhere except a couple thousand homes.
The big bridges on the three rivers, on the other hand! It seems to me that they're always always under repair.
There's A LOT more traffic across the Fern Hollow bridge than if the end destination were a couple of thousand homes. Average daily traffic ca. 2005 was 14.5k vehicles including transit bus routes with articulated buses that nominally carry 70+ at capacity. At rush hour I've been on those buses and they're regularly SRO.
The Goldstar memorial bridge over the Thames river in Connecticut is the same type as that I-35W bridge that failed in Minneapolis (only Goldstar is older and higher). I worry every time I cross it..
One morning I drove across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and it was quite foggy. I couldn't see the road surface very far ahead of me and had to just assume it would be there. Thankfully, it was. When I drove across the return span later in the day, I was happy to see the whole bridge before I started.
My intuition is that the huge iconic ones in globally significant metro areas probably receive closest to an adequate amount of attention and maintenance.
I'm much more worried about like, a random 40 foot bridge outside of the second largest suburb of the third largest city in a southern state or whatever. A short fall into icy water or just getting bonked by a piece of the falling bridge at the bottom is less dramatic but you'd be just as dead. And I'm pretty sure those bridges haven't seen an attentive engineer since whenever they were finished.
Various ancient bridges near my rural home have been "saved" by local morons (here they might be called "hillbillies") who organize elaborate campaigns to demand that the highway department not close them despite their ill repair. In some cases an alternative bridge has been built nearby at vastly increased expense, in other cases it just means that only morons use the existing rusted-out (or in the case of the "swinging" variety, multiple-broken-planked) bridge, carefully driving so they don't drop a tire into the holes.
How a utilitarian object riveted together out of commodity steel in 1910 is such a triumph of human will that it must be imposed on posterity forever, surpasses understanding.
I have never expressed that opinion to any of them. I have a personal rule, which I'll break now because I am quite curious: why is a crappy old dangerous bridge better than a new safe bridge?
[0] https://triblive.com/local/frick-park-bridge-collapses-natur...
[1] https://archive.ph/5u4de