$140 Billion Price Tag to Repair and Modernize America’s Bridges
Source: American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO)
As we approach the August 1 anniversary of the Minneapolis I-35W Bridge tragedy, Pennsylvania Transportation Department Secretary Allen Biehler announced the release of Bridging the Gap: Restoring and Rebuilding the Nation’s Bridges, a new report by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) that outlines the critical challenges ahead.
Among the report’s key findings:
- Age – Usually built to last 50 years, the average bridge in this country today is 43; almost 20 percent of these “Baby Boomer” bridges are over 50 years old. As age and traffic increase, so does the need for repair.
- The Price Tag – According to new data from the Federal Highway Administration, the cost to repair or modernize the country’s bridges is $140 billion-assuming all the bridges were fixed immediately.
- Traffic Congestion – Many of the nation’s large-scale bridges have become chokepoints on the country’s freeway system and a drain on the nation’s economy. The top 10 highway interchange bottlenecks cause an average of 1.5 million truck hours of delay each year.
- Soaring Construction Costs – The costs of steel, asphalt, concrete, and earthwork have risen by at least 50 percent in the past five years, forcing delays of bridge improvements and replacements. Nearly every state faces funding shortages that prevent them from the kind of on-going preventive maintenance, repair, and replacement needed to keep their bridges sound indefinitely.
This entry was posted
on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Government and politics, Infrastructure.
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