THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

That is about how long it would take to fix the 59,000 deficient bridges at the current rate of about 2,500 a year. Of course in that time we could reasonably expect that another 59,000 bridges would develop deficiencies. Now 59,000 are not about to fall down the next time you try to drive over them, but they have serious problems that need to be addressed including increasing costs of repair the longer we wait.

58,600 bridges that made the new list are in need of repair, and there are consequences that come with their decayed state. One of them is the need to impose weight restrictions. That doesn’t directly affect the average driver, but it can have an impact on the routes of tractor-trailers and, perhaps, buses and delivery trucks. That can cause delays and those delays, ultimately, may cost the average consumer money.

The ARTBA did some calculations and said that if placed end-to-end, the nation’s structurally deficient bridges would stretch from New York City to Miami (1,340 miles). The trade group said that while less than 10 percent of the country’s approximately 612,000 bridges are structurally deficient, nearly 204 million cars, trucks, schoolbuses and emergency vehicles cross them each day.

The ARTBA said that almost all of the 250 most heavily crossed deficient bridges are on urban highways, particularly in California. The analysis found the most deficient bridges in Iowa (5,025), Pennsylvania (4,783), Oklahoma (3,776), Missouri (3,222), Nebraska (2,474), Kansas (2,303), Illinois (2,244), Mississippi (2,184), North Carolina (2,085) and California (2,009). The District of Columbia (10), Nevada (35), Delaware (48), Hawaii (60) and Utah (95) had the least. (The report listed 1,063 deficient bridges in Virginia and 306 in Maryland.)

Alison Premo Black, ARTBA’s chief economist, said the five-year federal highway and transit law enacted last year provides a modest increase in funding for bridge repairs. But “the funding made available won’t come close to making an accelerated national bridge repair program possible,” she said. “It’s going to take major new investments by all levels of government to move toward eliminating the huge backlog of bridge work in the United States.”

The tragedy of all this is the Republican lust for obstruction kept so much of this work from being done at a time when the Federal government could have borrowed the money to fix the bridges a near 0% rates with the costs being more than covered by the boost in the economy. But the Republican/Teabagger drive to anarchy well kept that from ever happening.