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Nearly 56,000 Bridges Called Structurally Deficient (usatoday.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from USA Today: Nearly 56,000 bridges nationwide, which vehicles cross 185 million times a day, are structurally deficient, a bridge construction group announced Wednesday. The list is based on Transportation Department data. The department scores bridges on a nine-point scale, and while the deficient ones might not be imminently unsafe, they are classified in need of attention. More than one in four bridges (173,919) are at least 50 years old and have never had major reconstruction work, according to the ARTBA analysis. State transportation officials have identified 13,000 bridges along interstates that need replacement, widening or major reconstruction, according to the group. "America's highway network is woefully underperforming," said Alison Premo Black, the group's chief economics who conducted the analysis. "It is outdated, overused, underfunded and in desperate need of modernization." The five states with the most deficient bridges are Iowa with 4,968, Pennsylvania with 4,506, Oklahoma with 3,460, Missouri with 3,195 and Nebraska with 2,361. The eight states where at least 15% of the bridges are deficient are: Rhode Island at 25%, Pennsylvania at 21%, Iowa and South Dakota at 20%, West Virginia at 17%, and Nebraska, North Dakota and Oklahoma at 15%.
Iowa gets a LOT of welfare from the coastal states. The infrastructure there is great. Tons and tons of barely used roads (and bridges, obviously). People in the least dense parts of the state even get fiber to their doors.
I don't respond to AC's.
The most surprising thing about this story for me is that Iowa needs 5,000 bridges.
You shouldn't be. I drove through part of it last year (a very small corner of it) and being a relatively flat state (compared to PA), they need bridges to cross the roads, otherwise you'd have intersections all over the place, not to mention any rivers (creeks compared to rivers in the east) and those oddball depressions one comes across.
For example, if you take Exit 10 off of 29 N, you are at a bridge. That bridge is 29 N but under it is Route 2. Imagine if you had an intersection of 29, which is a highway, meeting a smaller, slower road such as Route 2.
Nebraska and South Dakota were the same way. Relatively flat states but lots of bridges to go over the other roads.
He's been in office for about 30 days and now the infrastructure of The Californian Reich is now on his shoulders? What about the decades of money that you fucks got and spent on sucking the asses of illegal immigrants? It's shit like this that makes me wish I had voted for him just to shove it in your fucking face. Next time I will vote for him.
As part of the election last november in Illinois. A lockbox provision was approved so that "transportation taxes" must only be spent on "transportation." I have been doing professional engineering services and consulting for IDOT, the Illinois Tollway, O'Hare, UP, CN railways etc. for 17 years, and it STILL took me a while to go through all the legalese on that question. It seems pretty thorough; Alas, I'm not a lawyer and currently waiting for all the legal contortions that will be spent to still spend that money on things that aren't quite related to transportation.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
I'd say technically, that is EXACTLY what they are. Their structure is lacking the width to handle current traffic levels, therefore it's structurally deficient. What you probably mean is that a bridge that is labeled as "structurally deficient" doesn't necessarily mean unsafe, but a bridge that needs to be widened to handle traffic is most certainly structurally deficient.
/pedantry
In 2013, 66,749 bridges were considered structurally deficient. This is a 17% decrease in the last 4 years. I think this should count as good news.
At all times, I needed roads and bridges which I could count on to keep me from becoming an organic smear on the inside of a steel Hot Pocket. Whether the product was avocados, oranges, corn or pigs it's nice for those of us who eat to know that the people making our food can get it to us.
I've made this point over and over - it's hard enough getting people to pay the bill to build infrastructure. The stuff is expensive, after all, and doesn't generally produce a profit by itself. ROI isn't obvious. It's vastly harder to get people to pay for maintenance/repairs/improvement when the average Joe can plainly see that it "looks fine to me". Never mind replacing it when the original item passes the lifespan originally set for it by the architects and engineers who originally designed and built the thing - it's always smarter to just replace or reinforce the critical parts, or to inspect it more often.
This was the one and only thing which POTUS said on the campaign trail which I found myself agreeing with - we need to put a lot of time, effort and resources into our infrastructure, starting yesterday. Incidentally, I don't mean building the Great Wall of America - I mean roads, bridges, dams, power plants, power grids, aqueducts, pipelines, flood control, . . .