Home » Study finds U.S. roads, bridges improving, not “crumbling”

Study finds U.S. roads, bridges improving, not “crumbling”

fleetnewsdaily | February 22, 2013

Courtesy of The Star-Ledger and NJ.com by Mike Frassinelli. The sky is not falling — and neither are our roads and bridges. That’s the conclusion of a report by the Reason Foundation think tank that examined two decades worth of highway data and found America’s roads had improved in nearly every state — including New Jersey — and highway fatality rates dropped in all 50 states.

The study looked at the years from 1989 to 2008, the latest available figures for full years, and seems to smack in the face of rhetoric that America’s highways are crumbling. The percentage of deficient bridges in the U.S. fell from 37.8 percent in 1989 to 23.7 percent in 2008. In New Jersey, the percentage of deficient bridges dipped slightly, from 28.5 percent in 1989 to 27.4 percent in 2008. New Jersey also went from 1.49 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles in 1989 to 0.8 deaths in 2008. “It’s not all doom and gloom,” said David Hartgen, lead author of the report and emeritus professor of transportation at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. But there was a price to pay for those better roads and bridges in America. Spending per mile on the roads grew by 60 percent, adjusted for inflation, to $145,000 per mile, according to the study. “I found only a modest linkage between how much the states spend and how much progress is made,” said Hartgen, noting that it will be increasingly important to target spending where it will do the most good. New Jersey was on a dubious list of seven states where more than 10 percent of urban interstates were considered to be in poor condition, and joined only California, Alaska and New York as states that had more than 5 percent of rural interstates in poor condition, according to the study. But New Jersey also made one of the biggest improvements in increasing the width of narrow lanes on major rural roads, making sure all lanes were at least 12 feet wide to improve visibility and safety, Hartgen said. Although New Jersey continued to have among the largest percentage of congested roadway miles (63.8 percent in 2008), it improved from a figure of 74.6 percent in 1989, according to the report. In all, New Jersey improved on five of the seven measures examined in the highway study. The rural interstate pavement condition improved, and the state saw reductions in urban congestion, deficient bridges, highway fatality rates and the amount of narrow lanes on rural primary roads. New Jersey, with 3,332 miles of state-administered highways, joined Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts in having the smallest state-administered highway systems, while neighboring Pennsylvania (43,612 miles) had one of the largest, along with North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and South Carolina. “It’s an older system with a lot of traffic,” Hartgen said of New Jersey. “It’s a through state with a lot of truck traffic, and the cost of doing repairs is expensive. It’s not an easy hand to play. To say they improved in five of seven measures — I think they have reason to be pleased.”