PrefaceThis book was written to make the material presented in my book, Stahlbetonbrucken, accessible to a larger number of engineers throughout the world. A work in English, the logical choice for this task, had been contemplated as Stahlbetonbrucken was still in its earliest stages of preparation. The early success of Stahlbetonbrucken provided significant impetus for the writing of Prestressed Concrete Bridges, which began soon after the publication of its predecessor.The present work is more than a mere translation of Stahlbetonbrucken. Errors in Stahlbetonbrucken that were detected after publication have been corrected. New material on the relation between cracking in concrete and corrosion of reinforcement, prestressing with unbonded tendons, skew-girder bridges, and cable-stayed bridges has been added. Most importantly, however, the presentation of the material has been extensively reworked to improve clarity and consistency. Prestressed Concrete Bridges can thus be regarded as a thoroughly new and improved edition of its predecessor. This book is guided by the same philosophy as its German-language counterpart: quality in the design and construction of bridges is achieved through the application of a small number of fundamental principles. In the last decade, the issue of durability in bridges has grown in importance, giving new urgency to the need for quality. The deterioration of bridges is often due to deficiencies in design, building materials, detailing, or construction. An awareness of quality and how it is achieved is thus crucial to preventing a repetition of past mistakes in the rehabilitation of existing structures and the design of new ones. Analytical refinement for its own sake continues to be the primary obstacle to quality in design. The preference found throughout Stahlbetonbrucken for clear, simple, case-specific calculations over more general analyses of greater complexity has therefore been maintained in the present work.Stahlbetonbrucken was largely based on direct experience gained from the design and construction of bridges in Switzerland over the past thirty years. As a result, much of the material discussed in the present work appears in a decidedly Swiss context. The main differences between this book and practise in other countries can be summarized as follows: VI Preface

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