More Than 70,000 Bridges Rated Deficient
| More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion.
That works out to at least $9.4 billion a year over 20 years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. The bridges carry an average of more than 300 million vehicles a day. |
That’s a whole pile of bridges! (And I hope that never even comes close to being literally true.)
I suspect a bridge we cross 4-6 times a week is one of them. It’s across the Pudding River on Whiskey Hill Road. I wonder about that bridge especially in winter when the river is high enough to almost “rub” the bridge’s underside.
In a related story, The Hill reports that a House panel OKs $250M for Twin Cities
| House Transportation Chairman Jim Oberstar (D) on Thursday called for an increase in gas taxes and more investment in roads and bridges in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse in his home state Wednesday. |
Mr. Oberstar, the government is already increasing (very substantially) the price of our fuel. How about the US Congress do the right thing on this one?
Eliminate Earmarks and Better Bridges
(Better there is a verb.)
Or if they simply cannot do without their earmarks, how about this idea: Any earmark in a bill that has nothing to do with the bill shall be permanently replaced with an earmark for maintaining, upgrading, and replacing US infrastructure (beginning with bridges).
An earmark thus replaced cannot appear again in any bill until ten years pass.