Transportation For America National report and interactive map shows the state of our nation's bridges

National report and interactive map shows the state of our nation’s bridges

30 Mar 2011 | Posted by Steve Davis | 4 Comments | bridges, featured, infrastructure, maps, new reports

69,223 bridges – representing more than 11 percent of all U.S. highway bridges – are classified as “structurally deficient,” requiring significant maintenance, rehabilitation or replacement, according to a new T4 America report released today, The Fix We’re In: The State of Our Nation’s Bridges.

Those are the facts, and 69,000 bridges sure sounds like a lot, but what does that look like in real terms? Where are these bridges? Does your city or state have a lot of deficient bridges, or does the state do a good job taking care of them? Those questions are going to be much easier to answer with our online tools accompanying the report, launching today at t4america.org/resources/bridges.

We’ve taken the whole federal bridge database and put it online in a map, so you can type your address, and see all the bridges within a ten-mile radius. Structurally deficient bridges will show up as red icons. Click any bridge and you’ll get more information about it, including its rating in a box on the right.

Curious about how your state stacks up? Click on “By State” and click your state to see a quick overview of their performance, including the best and worst five counties, as well as their rank nationally and total percentage of structurally deficient bridges.

The national report and all 51 state reports are being officially released today at noon with a national telebriefing, but you can go ahead and check out the map and data now on our site. (Media members? Contact david.goldberg@t4america.org if you want information on the telebriefing.)

Check out the map today and please spread the word about it. We’ll be posting several times throughout the day with more information about the national report, which is available for download now — as well as reports for all 50 states and D.C.

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4 Comments

rasteiner
13 years ago

I thought T4 America was about improving PUBLIC transportation. Spending $70.9 billion to repair decaying and ageing bridges only benefits PERSONAL transportation. Total Federal, State and local taxes collected from privately owned vehicles (POV) amounts to less than 50% of the cost of maintaining the roads and bridges a POV drives on. As the price gasoline increases the federal tax revenue goes down because it is a fixed rate per gallon (18.4 cents per gallon since 1993).

T4 America should focus on the declining amount that personal and private transportation contributes to the cost of maintaining public roads and bridges!
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Stephen Lee Davis
13 years ago

@rasteiner, T4 America is about improving transportation and providing everyone with options for getting around that don’t break the bank and get us where we need to go. For many, that’ll be a personal vehicle, for many others, that’ll be a bike, on foot, or a bus or train. We certainly want to see more money for public transportation overall, but we certainly are in favor of maintaining and preserving the system that we’ve already invested in. Even with robust public transportation and better passenger rail all over the country, we’ll still need good bridges. And many states’ bridges are in such bad condition because they’re spending money intended for bridge repairs elsewhere. That needs to change.
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