In Los Angeles, for example, an average 396 drivers cross a deficient bridge every second, the study found. The Fix We're In For: The State of Our Metro-Area Bridges, ranks 102 metro areas in three population categories based on the percentage of deficient bridges.
The report found that Pittsburgh, PA had the highest percentage of deficient bridges (30.4 percent) for a metro area with a population of over 2 million (and overall). Oklahoma City, OK (19.8 percent) topped the chart for metro areas between 1-2 million, as did Tulsa, OK (27.5 percent) for metro areas between 500,000-1 million.
At the other end of the spectrum, the metro areas that had the smallest percentage of deficient bridges are: Orlando, FL (0.60 percent) for the largest metro areas; Las Vegas (0.20 percent) for mid-sized metro areas; and Fort Meyers, FL (0.30 percent) for smaller metro areas.
'There are more deficient bridges in our metropolitan areas than there are McDonald's restaurants in the entire country,' said James Corless, director of Transportation for America, 18,239 versus roughly 14,000 McDonald's. 'These metropolitan-area bridges are most costly and difficult to fix, but they also are the most urgent, because they carry such a large share of the nation's people and goods.'
Nearly 70,000 bridges nationwide are rated 'structurally deficient' and are in need of substantial repair or replacement, according to federal data. Metropolitan-area bridges carry 75 percent of the trips that are made on structurally deficient bridges, he noted.
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) estimates that the backlog of potentially dangerous bridges would cost $70.9 billion to eliminate, while the federal outlay for bridges amounts to slightly more than $5 billion per year.
'The recent shutdown of the Sherman-Minton Bridge between Kentucky and Indiana was yet another reminder of the urgent need to repair our nation's bridges,' Corless said. 'A sincere initiative to fix these bridges would put thousands of people to work while ensuring that these critical links continue to carry people safely to work and that goods can make it to market, now and well into the future.'
Congress has repeatedly declared the condition and safety of America's bridges to be of national significance. However, the current federal program falls short of the need, even as it allows states to shift funds from maintenance toward new construction, whether or not they can show progress toward rehabilitating deficient bridges.
Some states have worked hard to address the problem and have seen their backlog of deficient bridges shrink in number. However, two problems continue to persist: Existing federal programs offer no real incentives or assurances that aging bridges will actually get fixed; and the current level of investment is nowhere near what is needed to keep up with our rapidly growing backlog of aging bridges.
Last month, President Obama introduced his jobs billbefore the Brent Spencer bridge in Cincinnati, OH, just weeks after engineers shutdown the Sherman-Minton Bridge due to cracks in the bridge supports, and also identified potential faults in the nearby Kennedy Bridge Since then, the President has regularly highlighted the poor state of our nation's bridges and the need to pass a jobs bill that will put construction workers and engineers back
