When it comes to improving its infrastructure, America seems to be on a bridge to nowhere.
One out of every nine bridges in the United States—a grand total of 66,503 bridges altogether—has been found to have one or more significant defects, according to a June report by Transportation for America.
For the 260 million drivers who put themselves at risk on these aging structures each day, that statistic may not come as a shock.
This past May, the I-5 bridge in Mount Vernon, Wash. buckled like a children’s toy after a truck slammed into an overhead girder. While no one was killed, three people were injured, and the repair cost has been put at $15 million.
Even more horrific was 2007’s I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, which tumbled into the Mississippi River during the evening rush hour, killing 13 and injuring 145. Replacing the mangled structure has cost taxpayers a whopping $234 million.
“Some of this infrastructure is more than a hundred years old, but wasn’t designed with more than a 50-year lifespan in mind,” Rick Grant, owner of Russell Corrosion, a Maryland-based company that assess the condition of infrastructure, told the Daily News. “There’s simply not enough money to replace all the bridges that need it, so the question is how much can we can we repair?”
Just how much money is needed to repair the country’s crumbling infrastructure? A report card issued this month by the American Society of Civil Engineers that gave the country an overall grade of D+, the federal government will need to spend $20.5 billion each year, rather than the $12.8 billion it is currently doling out, just to keep the nation’s bridges safe.
In New York City alone, dozens of local bridges and overpasses have been deemed structurally deficient, including a Queens section of the Belt Parkway that handles 142,100 cars each day, was built in 1940 and is currently inspected every two years, or a portion I-278 near York St. in Brooklyn that handles 121,124 cars on a given day and was constructed in 1944.
In 13 of New York’s southern counties alone 480 bridges have been rated structurally deficient, making it easier to understand how the ASCE arrived at a C+ grade for the nation’s bridges.
“I would say that our bridges are in worse shape than that,” Grant said. “I think the American public needs to be made aware of the state of our problem.”
Grant says a combination of factors, including the fact that most of the country’s aging bridges were built at a time when there were far fewer vehicles on the roadways, is contributing to the decay.
Diagnosing the myriad problems is one thing, however, while fixing them is another altogether, and a sobering fact shadowing the current partisan spending battle in Washington over the reauthorization of this year’s transportation bill: the Highway Trust Fund, the very pot of money that pays for much needed repairs to the country’s roads and bridges, is about to go broke.
“The current trajectory of the Highway Trust Fund is unsustainable,” the Congressional Budget Office said in a recent statement. “Starting in fiscal year 2015, the trust fund will have insufficient resources to meet all of its obligations, resulting in steadily accumulating shortfalls.”
Funded by an 18.4 cents per gallon fuel tax, the Highway Trust Fund takes in around $35 billion each year. The problem is that America’s aging infrastructure will require much more money than that.
A glance at two high-profile projects besieged by continual cost overruns highlights the severity of the problem facing the country. In San Francisco, the replacement of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge will cost at least $6.9 billion, while the price tag for New York’s Tappan Zee bridge repairs will reach more than $3.9 billion.
In July, the U.S. Senate authorized $54 billion to fund next year’s combined transportation and housing bill, while the Republican controlled House has proposed just $44 billion.
So far, Congress seems unwilling to move forward with the politically risky idea of raising the national gasoline tax to address the shortfall, a move supported by the somewhat unlikely trio of President Obama, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO.
“When you look the politicians in Congress, some serve two year terms, others six, and they’re not really looking to the future, they’re looking to get reelected,” Andrew Herrmann, past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “You have to look out for the county, and they aren’t doing that.”
In fact, Congress seems dead set on avoiding a long term fix to the infrastructure problem, increasingly allocating money for repairs in shorter, two-year allotments, than the four-year increments of past spending authorizations.
“Two years kind of ties their hands,” Herrmann said. “You can’t plan major projects in that amount of time.”
Funding multi-year upgrades to the nation’s roads and bridges will require bolder political will than is currently being displayed in Congress, Herrmann believes, and the ASCE estimates that the federal government will need to spend $20.5 billion annually, rather than the $12.8 billion is being spent currently, to keep the nation’s bridges safe.
In the absence of that, it may just be a matter of time until the next bridge collapse.