>> URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2216532
>
> This is Slate's bread & butter, no? A conventional piece that purports to be
> against the grain.
Yep, which is why I feel funny thinking he might have any kind of a point.
> <http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/>.
>
>> More than 26%, or one in four, of the nation's bridges are either
>> structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
Schafer's reply to this (from article at the link above):
http://www.slate.com/id/2216532
The scary-sounding phrases structurally deficient and functionally
obsolete combined with those big numbers are enough to make you bite
your nails bloody every time you drive over a river or beneath an
underpass. Yet if any of the cited pieces paused to define either
inspection term, you'd come away from the alarmist stories with a yawn.
As a 2006 report by U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway
Administration puts it (very large PDF):
Structural deficiencies are characterized by deteriorated conditions
of significant bridge elements and reduced load carrying capacity.
Functional obsolescence is a function of the geometrics of the
bridge not meeting current design standards. Neither type of
deficiency indicates that the bridge is unsafe. [Emphasis added.]
A "structurally deficient" bridge can safely stay in service if weight
limitations are posted and observed and the bridge is monitored,
inspected, and maintained. A bridge designed in the 1930s could be
deemed "functionally obsolete" because it's narrower than modern
standards dictate or because its clearance over a highway isn't up to
modern snuff, not because it's in danger of tumbling down. (The
Department of Transportation's 2004 inventory found 77,796 U.S. bridges
structurally deficient and 80,632 functionally obsolete, for a totally
of 158,428 deficient bridges.)
None of this is to suggest that we needn't worry about repairing or
maintaining bridges, only to observe that the state of the nation's
bridges ain't as dire as the press makes it out.
<snip>
So credulous is press coverage that reporters almost never ask whether
some Rust Belt bridges might be redundant or economically superfluous
because industry and population have moved on. And just because a
bridge occupied a place on the traffic grid once shouldn't give it a
right to eternal service.
<snip>
For those of us who track infrastructure madness in the press, the
current round is mighty familiar. As deplorable as our bridges may be,
they're better than they were a generation ago. Today, the government
classifies about 25 percent of U.S. bridges as structurally deficient
or functionally obsolete. A July 18, 1982, New York Times article
headlined "Alarm Rise Over Decay in U.S. Public Works" cites government
statistics that classify 45 percent of U.S. bridges deficient or
obsolete.
<end excerpt>
That last stat gives me a little pause. We improved by almost half in the last 25 years? When government has been starved and there's been zero alarms? In that case, Why shouldn't the figure 25 years from now be 12% just following business as usual? I'm not saying it will. I'm just being a devil's advocate -- why shouldn't it, if the secular trend has been radical improvement?
Michael