19 Structurally Deficient Bridges That Americans Drive Over Every Day

Business Insider's Henry Blodget recently wrote on the need for infrastructure spending in the United States.

Something that drives that point home is how badly some of our essential infrastructure has decayed. As of last year, 11.5 percent of US bridges, crossed by an average of 282,672,680 vehicles daily, were graded as structurally deficient by the Federal Highway Administration.

Private construction is way up, but reduced public spending is a drag on the economy.

When we have 8.2 percent unemployment, historically low borrowing rates, and a stagnant recovery, we need to be fixing this and building better infrastructure for the future. Here's somewhere we can start.

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Note on terminology: A sufficiency rating is a measure of a bridge's sufficiency to stay in service based on four separate factors. A deck is the bridge's supporting surface, the superstructure supports the deck, and the substructure is the bridge's foundation.
Each of the following bridges is on the FHA's list, and has a sufficiency rating below 80, which is the threshold below which a bridge is considered deficient.
Source: National Bridge Inventory, Transportation For America


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