A bridge collapse spotlights a big unseen danger
Can we see it?
Buddy asks why bring me down here under the bridge? Looks pretty decrepit. Are we going to look at the other bridges too?
One night two months ago the Forbes Avenue Bridge in Pittsburgh fell into the ravine below. Four cars and a bus with two passengers were on the bridge at the time. The bridge would have carried around 14,000 cars that day.
Anyone looking at images of the near-tragedy might wonder how many other bridges in America are near collapse. The answer is a whole lot! Of the 617,000 bridges across the country, 42% are over 50 years old, and 46,154 are considered structurally deficient.
Americans take 178 million trips across a structurally deficient bridge each day.
IT’S EASY TO SEE THE BIG THREAT HERE, RIGHT?
No, it’s not that we might fall into a ravine. Only a few score bridges collapse each year. Engineers try to make sure dangerous bridges are speed- or weight-reduced first, and then closed before they fail. So, compared to other physical dangers in our lives, the risk of being on or under a falling bridge is tiny.
The real threat, little understood, is financial. The condition of our bridges is a good indicator, not of our future medical bills, but of our future tax bills. A recent estimate for the nation’s backlog of bridge repairs is $125 billion just to rehabilitate (patch up, not replace) their deficient bridges.
Thankfully, we’re a tiny bit better off today than in past years. Last November’s Infrastructure Bill contains $110 billion for roads, bridges ($40 billion), and major transportation projects. But this money has limits.
It’s over five years, likely limiting any more federal infrastructure money during that time.
It’s matching funds, so states and towns must come up with 2% and 7% of the costs of projects.
The result: we’re looking at serious infrastructure costs for a long time.
SO WHAT’S THAT GOT TO DO WITH CLIMATE-PROOFING OUR LIVES?
Climate change is a gowing decay factor. Rapidly rising temperatures and increasing extreme weather are accelerating deterioration. Heat softens asphalt; precipitation corrodes steel and rebar in prestressed concrete. Floods wash out footings. As bridges deteriorate faster, these new infrastructure dollars only keep us running in place.
It’s for relatively few projects. Even after some rehabilitation projects get funded by the Infrastructure Bill, the money for road and bridge problems will still need to be raised from state and city budgets taxes. Or through ‘partnerships’ with private enterprise (think toll booths on those repaired bridges).
Yesterday’s infrastructure competes against tomorrow’s. Here’s the big worry, something that most of us who celebrate the new federal funds don’t think about. Those road and bridge expenditures will postpone outlays to protect us and our children by building seawalls against a rising ocean; rebuilding overflowing sewers to reduce pollution; installing permeable pavement to cut flooding; developing new water sources; or financing retreat from sea level rise. Many towns, as they rebuild today’s infrastructure, may never find the money to build protections from tomorrow’s dangers from climate change.
And, hey, bridges are just one element of America’s infrastructure. From the American Society of Civil Engineers, we get terrible grades on our roads (D), drinking water systems (D), school buildings (D+), ports (C+), waterways (D). wastewater (D+), and transit systems (D-). If we squint it’s easy to see lots of dollar signs behind those grades.
WHAT DEFENSIVE STRATEGIES MAKE SENSE?
First find out what our risks are. Do we live where few repairs are needed? If so, we should stick around. Enjoy.
More likely ours is a hometown where the effects of climate-change are going to surprise our officials, goose our cost of living, and erode our lifestyle. If so, we should think about moving to somewhere that’s not in the crosshairs of climate change, or at least help our children make that choice. (See our growing list of climate-prooof indicators.)
If ours is a climate-threatened place, but we intend to stay, we should start working proactively with town leadership to find ways to reduce wear and tear on our aging bridges and roads. These might include rezoning to help concentrate traffic and reduce commutes, redesigning streets to slow traffic, creating more attractive biking and walking routes, or reducing parking in downtown areas to encourage transit use.
We should get our town, county and state to stop building roads and bridges. Yes, just stop! Ribbon-cutting officials routinely spend less on maintaining the infrastructure we have than on building new projects (requiring future maintenance).
State DOTs’ lack of fiscal discipline is nothing short of criminal. States use most of their money on new construction. Meanwhile, states use what’s left over to maintain the remaining 98.7 percent of road infrastructure. This is a recipe for ruin. [Angie Schmitt, STREETSBLOGUSA]
Help elect local leaders who understand what climate change is sending us. The steps above are not going to be popular, or understood, by most local residents. We’ll need persausive leaders.
Strong Towns is one of the most astute and innovative organizations studying how to reduce future costs. It offers a treasury of ideas about how we can deal with the structurally-deficient-bridges problem, with lots of examples. They summarize their novel and, we think, enlightened approach to this and related problems as
Stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience
Stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn.
Stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous adaptation.
Stop building our world based on abstract theories, and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today.
Stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances. [Smart Towns]
These are all precepts that Buddy and I believe should pervade our thinking as we take on the other growing challenges from climate change. But can we imagine politicians winning elections by putting these little-understood ideas in their platforms? They’re going to need us to support, spread, and sell these ideas. And the faster the better! Right now our state officials are salivating over plans for new bridges and roads - not over the less-visible climate-protection projects we need.
LEARN, THINK, ACT
Check out our county. Some hometowns face staggering costs; others almost nothing. We can look up the number of bridges rated deficient in our county, and the cost of fixing them by state.
The Bridge section of the Report Card for America’s Infrastructure gives a good short overview of the situation. We can research other infrastructure problems too.
Here’s the best case we’ve seen for spending less on new infrastructure and more on maintaining what we have.
Strong Towns offers many examples of their recommendations. Here are their ideas about bridges . . . and, as Buddy discovered, about dogs!