Maintenance, repairs and replacements needed for US Bridges

The US is in desperate need of rebuilding many of its road bridges. This comes from an analysis of official data carried out by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA). According to ARTBA’s analysis of the US Department of Transportation’s just released 2017 National Bridge Inventory database, 54,259 of the nation’s 612,677 bridges are rated structurally deficient. The work is needed as these transport links are vital, with Americans crossing these deficient bridges 174 million
February 1, 2018 Read time: 2 mins

The US is in desperate need of rebuilding many of its road bridges. This comes from an analysis of official data carried out by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA). According to ARTBA’s analysis of the US Department of Transportation’s just released 2017 National Bridge Inventory database, 54,259 of the nation’s 612,677 bridges are rated structurally deficient. The work is needed as these transport links are vital, with Americans crossing these deficient bridges 174 million times/day. The average age of a structurally deficient bridge is 67 years, compared to 40 years for non-deficient bridges. The report says that one in three (226,837) US bridges have identified repair needs and more worryingly still, one in three (17,726) Interstate highway bridges have identified repair needs.

The US Interstate Highway System carries 75% of the nation’s heavy truck traffic.  The report finds there is the equivalent of one “structurally deficient”-rated bridge, on average, for every 43km of the major highway network. The 1,800 structurally deficient Interstate bridges are crossed 60 million times daily.

The pace of improving the inventory of structurally deficient bridges slowed this past year.  At the current pace of repair or replacement, it would take 37 years to remedy all of them, according to Dr Alison Premo Black, chief economist for the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA), who conducted the analysis.

Finance & Funding Road Structures

Related Content

  • Bertha ends her Alaskan Way voyage in Seattle
    December 21, 2017
    Seattle's State Route 99 viaduct is coming down. David Arminas was on site. Bertha, the world’s largest diameter earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine, with a cutterhead diameter of 17.5m, is no more. Her 2.7km journey underneath the waterfront area of Seattle finished on April 4 and the power went off for the last time on an extraordinary TBM that had finally completed an extraordinary job. “A small sidewalk job would have had more impact on city traffic than we have had,” says Brian Russell a v
    Read More
  • CET opens new laboratory to service UK’s infrastructure projects
    October 23, 2017
    With over £300 billion of investment in infrastructure planned over the next four years in the UK, materials testing firm CET is gearing up to service a lot more projects – Kristina Smith visited the newest laboratory near Heathrow to find out more. The CET Group has ambitious plans. Over the next four years it wants to double the size of its business, which in the last year turned over £27 million. “There’s a lot of positivity out there,” said Gary Corrigan, managing director of the group’s infrastructu
    Read More
  • A new event is preparing the asphalt industry for tomorrow’s world
    September 11, 2018
    An inaugural event for the European bitumen industry urged attendees to look to the future - Kristina Smith reports What will tomorrow’s roads look like? Will lanes be narrower, will the road charge vehicles as they drive on them, will they collect data, will they be self-cleaning and de-polluting? All these questions and more were pondered at a two-day conference in Berlin, entitled ‘Preparing the asphalt industry for the future’. It was the first such event for Eurasphalt & Eurobitume (E&E), and set a
    Read More
  • Defective eyesight, a road safety concern?
    February 16, 2012
    Failing eyesight presents safety problems for Europe's older drivers. A new report highlights substantial variation in the assessment of drivers' vision across Europe, and recommends that Member States make moves to better assess drivers' vision. Checking the vision of drivers plays a valuable role in the EU's target of halving road deaths across the EU by 2020. The aim is to achieve this road safety improvement by legislative means that change driver behaviour, raise the technical standards of vehicles and
    Read More

Highlighted Content