FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
New Report: 54,000 Bridges That Americans Use 174 Million Times Daily Are ‘Structurally Deficient’
Jan. 30, 2018 (EIRNS)—The American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) issued a report yesterday on the eve of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, on the sorry state of bridges (“Over 54,000 American Bridges Structurally Deficient, Analysis of New Federal Data Shows”). The analysis by its economists is derived from Federal data contained in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2017 National Bridge Inventory database. Some 54,259 American highway bridges are “structurally deficient,” it shows, on structures that “cars, trucks, and school buses cross these … compromised structures 174 million times every day.” One in three bridges (226,837) in the country is in need of repair, in addition to 17,726 bridges along the 48,000 miles of the Interstate Highway System. The ARTBA’s website lists the bridges by state and by congressional district.
At the current pathetic rate of repair or replacement, the ARTBA’s analysis reveals, it would take 37 years to remedy all of the deficient bridges, says ARTBA’s chief economist Dr. Alison Premo Black. In anticipation that President Trump’s State of the Union address will include a building program, Dr. Black says that an infrastructure package would have both short and long-term positive effects on the economy, which currently loses $60 billion per year in just the trucking industry, in lost productivity and fuel just from traffic bottlenecks.
The ARTBA was created in 1902, to be “the consensus voice” of the U.S. transportation design and construction industry.
