Nearly 59,000 U.S. Bridges Structurally Deficient

A new analysis of the nation’s roads has a bit of good news and bad news in it.

On the positive side of the ledger, there were 2,574 fewer structurally deficient bridges in 2015 compared to the number in 2014.

The bad news is there are still 58,500 on the structurally deficient list—and at the current pace of bridge investment—it would take at least 21 years before they were all replaced or upgraded.

Those are among the key findings in a new analysis of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s recently-released 2015 “National Bridge Inventory” database.

The American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA), which conducts an annual review of state bridge data collected by the federal agency, notes that if placed end-to-end, the deck surface of the nation’s structurally deficient bridges would stretch from New York City to Miami (1,340 miles).

About nine-and-a-half percent of the nation’s approximately 610,000 bridges are classified as structurally deficient, ARTBA found, but cars, trucks, school buses and emergency vehicles cross these deficient structures nearly 204 million times a day.

Almost all of the 250 most heavily crossed structurally deficient bridges are on urban highways, particularly in California.  Nearly 85 percent were built before 1970.

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