Yes.
Also, I don’t agree with your logic. The 2000 people who’ve already elected to become harbor hamburger are dead and gone. Any money spent now is only going to impact future jumpers, and I have to question how much. Suicide by bridge won’t become impossible, just harder. Be that as it may, even if all 30 potential suicides per year are stopped by the barriers, you won’t get to the average 40K/jumper cost for 68 more years. Until then the figure will be higher.
I heard some of this on Forum this morning. About 75 people per year are prevented from jumping. Some of these (and the few who survived) were tracked, and very few ever tried it again. Given the record over the past 70 years, there is no reason to think the suicide rate would decrease without the barrier.
The barrier, for those who don’t know, is now 4.5 feet tall, and easy to climb over. The original plans were for it to be well over five feet tall, but they got changed. There was a meeting this morning of the board of trustees of the bridge (which is private, by the way) for the purpose of voting on a $2 million study. They were planning to look outside for the money, since the bridge does have a deficit. The trick is to get a feasible barrier which is not ugly and which can resist the wind up there.
BTW, they no longer publish the figures on jumpers, since they don’t want to encourage people.
If people want to kill themselves, thats their choice, rational or not. I dont give a rats ass about anyone who doesnt give a rats ass for themselves; I defer to their superior knowledge on the subject.
The only concern I have with people swan diving off the GG is they might hit someone below in a boat or something. In all honesty the money would be better spent building a platform for people who want to jump off to use, with a buoyed off area in the water below for boats etc to avoid, preferably on the south east side a little ways past the toll booths. This would have the added benefit of making the fishing off Fort Point Pier all that much better.
It’s a simplistic question, but what about the 6 other bridges?
Well, in that case, you can defer to my superior knowledge of what it’s like to be suicidal. Somebody in that position isn’t making choices - they’re incapable of making choices.
Not much at all, thanks.
Not always true. I have contemplated suicide several times and I was capable of making choices.
Is the bridge management group really worried about preventing suicides, or has someone threatened a lawsuit because the management team failed to protect a loved one from his own actions?
I’m in the bay area, and I couldn’t believe what I heard on the radio today. The local station was playing exerpts from people testifying at the hearing. One guy apparently jumped, and survived a few years ago (rare, but it happens). I’ll paraphrase what he said:
“This should have been done years ago! I AM SO ANGRY at all of you! If you had done your job and installed this like you should have, I would NOT HAVE BROKEN MY BACK. I would NOT HAVE A METAL PLATE ON MY SPINE”
:rolleyes:
I was ready to toss the guy off for a second go at it.
I don’t think you can walk on any of the other bridges. You definitely can’t on the Bay, Richmond, or Benicia Bridges. (I’m a North Bay girl, haven’t had many opportunities to go over the Carquinez or Dumbarton Bridges. What’s the sixth?)
I’ve heard that very, very few of the suicides are off the west side of the bridge, which by itself is a sign that they are not spur of the moment. People will run through the traffic to get to the east side. The west side has a view of the ocean and the rocky Marin headlands - it’s wide open and pretty empty (although if it’s really, really clear, you can see the Farallones Islands). On the east side you can see Alcatraz and Angel Island and the skylines of San Francisco and Oakland and the Bay Bridge a little bit down and the East Bay hills and the expensive south Marin houses and people out sailboating. You’re gonna end up dead no matter which side you jump off, but for some reason even suicides don’t want to die facing the ocean side.
San Mateo. Lotsa pelicans, no pedestrians.
Did’t you west coast types build any tunnels to go with your bridges? Over here in the original city by the bay, we’ve got both. Or is that only for the BART?
Biffy, d’oh, thanks. Clearly, I’ve been in Chicago too long. Still, my point stands, the Golden Gate is the only bridge that permits pedestrians.
WeirdDave, nope, the only tunnel is the Transbay Tube on BART. I remember the first time I rode BART from San Francisco to Oakland. I must have been about four or five. My mom explained that we were going to go under the bay, and I was so freaking excited, because I thought we were going to see FISH! Damn, was that a letdown.
It was surprisingly hard to find this info, but it looks like the Chesapeake Bay is significantly shallower than the San Francisco Bay, which is why tunnels are more convenient there. The Chesapeake’s maximum depth is about 21 feet and most of it is shallow enough that some basketball players could walk across it without drowning. The San Francisco Bay is as deep as 100 feet in spots (although there are parts that significantly shallower). I’m not an engineer, of course, but maybe it’s easier to build bridges in deeper water than tunnels. Also, it occurs to me that the great bridges in San Francisco were built in the 1930s and bridge-tunnel engineering wasn’t in use then. (I assume - the Chesapeake Bridge Tunnel wasn’t built til 1964.) The bridges are a big part of Bay Area identity, so if you’ll pardon the geocentrism, the idea of having tunnels instead just seems weird. (Oooh, unintentional pun, I swear!)
While the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel is certainly something to see (And you’ll pay for the privilege too, something like $12 to cross it IIRC), it’s way the hell and gone south of here. I was thinking more of the Francis Scott Key (I-695) and Bay (I-50) Bridges, along with the Fort McHenry(I-95) and Harbor(I-895) Tunnels. I’m not sure why each was chosen, but the tunnels are close to the city, I don’t think it would look very good to have 2 big-ass bridges spanning Baltimore’s Inner Harbor( or close enough ) .
$12?? There’d better be something fucking awesome on the other side to pay $12 to cross a bridge.
Some quick googling shows that the Baltimore tunnels were, on the whole, built later than the Bay Area bridges. There’s some overlap, but the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge was completed in 1936 and the Golden Gate in 1937. The Francis Scott Key tunnel was completed in 1977 and the Fort McHenry in 1985. My uneducated guess is that tunnel engineering improved a lot in that time, and I imagine that local politics probably played into it as well, based on my observation of the wrangling over the new Bay Bridge. It has to be done, but it’s been fifteen and a half years since the Loma Prieta earthquake made that obvious and they’re just starting construction now.
It’s possible to contemplate suicide without being suicidal. (No, I’m not splitting hairs. Suicidal is pretty much by definition a state beyond that of rational choice.)
Thanks for defending my math, Weirddave. I think I argued the point poorly initially.
GorrillaMan, you seem to be arguing that the state should pay to keep temporarily irrational people from hurting themselves. What I don’t understand is why that applies only to bridges and how the state is supposed to tell if they really are temporarily insane or if they’ve rationally chosen to die because they have incurable cancer. Should it be the state’s job to remove or blunt all objects that are commonly used for suicide? Won’t that just lead to more creative suicide methods?
Honestly, isn’t it preferable that if someone wants to die, they choose a method that won’t endager bystanders? Yes, one could argue that family and loved ones are damaged mentally by a suicide, but I bet what pains them most is their own guilty conscience.
The master speaks sort of on the topic. I’ll trust his numbers because I’m too lazy to double check. So, since 1937 about 2000 people have jumped from the Golden Gate, 1200 since 2003. I didn’t realize the dot.com crash was so bad. Still, I wonder if there is any correlation between this increased number of suicides and any population growths in the bay area. Got data?
my bad: “at least 1200 as of 2003” not since. Appologies.
That still makes 800 since 2003 – quite an increase in the rate
The SFGate link given in the OP says:
I would imagine that Cecil was going with the conservative “known jumpers” number, which means his “1200 as of 2003” vs the San Francisco Chronicle’s “1300 as of Feb 2005” would suggest that the suicide rate is remaining pretty steady. I haven’t heard any other mention of an increase in the suicide rate over the last few years.