U.S. Bridges: In a State of Disrepair

Transportation for America has released its updated report on America's transportation infrastructure entitled "The Fix We're in For: The State of Our Nation's Bridges." The report analyzes data and statistics on bridges all across the country and finds that 11 percent of all bridges in the United States are structurally deficient. This means that "laid end to end, all the country's deficient bridges would span from Washington, DC to Denver, Colorado," which is a distance of 1500 miles.

The report states that in ten years, one in four bridges will be 65 years old or older and that more than half of bridges of this age are structurally deficient. Additionally, progress on repairing deficient bridges in the U.S. has slowed down to nearly three times slower in the last four years compared to twenty years ago.

Included in the report is a state-by-state table of the percentage of structurally deficient bridges and compares those numbers with data from a 2011 survey. While more than half of U.S. states have ultimately lowered their number of deficient bridges, 15 states now have more deficient bridges than before. The stagnant or worsening state of bridge repair is attributed to years of depressed revenues in state governments, but also to Congress' elimination of the dedicated bridge fund and the delay in establishing a new performance measures system that monitors bridge repair.

As a supplement to this report, Transportation for America has created an interactive map on its website where users can search for structurally deficient bridges in their area.

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