Filed under: Safety

Here's some bad news for all of us: Over 150,000 bridges in the U.S. have been judged to be "structurally deficient or functionally obsolete." And get this, there are less than 598,000 bridges in America. That means 25.7% aren't in very good shape. It turns out that the state with the most structurally deficient or functionally obsolete (SD/FO) bridges is Texas, with 9,564 such bridges. However, Texas is ginormous - almost half the size of Alaska - and therefore has a lot of bridges, but the percentage of Texan SD/FO bridges is 19%. And that's significantly lower than the national average.
What state has the most SD/FO bridges? Betcha never would have guessed the District of Columbia. For one thing, it's not even a state! For another, you'd think being in such close proximity to all that Washingtonian largesse would be good for something. Turns out,
not. Anyhow, 55% of the bridges in our nation's capital are going to fall down/fail sooner than later says
The Better Roads Bridge Inventory survey.
The actual State with the highest percentage of bad bridges is Rhode Island with 53%. Pennsylvania takes second place honors with 39%. The really bad news, according to the
frighteningly detailed article, is that all these numbers might be
low.
[Source:
Better Roads via
The Car Connection | Image: Scott Olson/Getty]
REPORT: More than 25% of US bridges are "structurally deficient or functionally obsolete" originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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