The crisis of U.S. infrastructure, II

(a Federal Highway Administration spokeswomen said the agency does not have summary information about the location and size of the worst bridges). The surge of bridge inspections that followed the disaster in Minnesota turned up a second bridge with bowed gusset plates across the Mississippi in Minneapolis-St. Paul — it was immediately closed and slated for repairs — and another one in Duluth. The Minnesota Legislature found numerous shortcomings in the state inspectors’ work on the I-35 bridge that had been tagged as structurally deficient for some cracking and fatigue. According to the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) investigators, however, the inspectors were not the problem. Indeed, the investigators cited the effort to repair the bridge, which entailed piling construction supplies and equipment on its overburdened deck, and the thin gusset plates as the likely leading causes of the I-35 collapse. The more that they have learned about the disaster, the less it has served as a morality tale. As for a fear of falling bridges, “I don’t really think we’re in a crisis,” said economist Small. He also mentioned the “pretty strong” system of bridge inspections and placed the 13 deaths in Minnesota into the context of all U.S. traffic fatalities, which average 120 a day. “If you plot the statistics,” he noted, “you might not notice the bump.”

On the roads, too, drunk drivers or malfunctioning vehicles cause many more deaths than potholes or crumbling concrete. The roads are OK, but there are not enough of them to hold the traffic, and building more will only increase demand. The gridlock is worst of all around Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Chicago, New York City, Atlanta, and Washington, but it has also spread into unlikelier venues. A third lane is being built along certain truck-clogged stretches of Interstate 80 in Iowa and Nebraska. The GAO’s Siggerud pointed to “bottlenecks in every mode of transportation,” which stand to get worse. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has predicted that air traffic may triple during the next two decades, and the American Road & Transportation Builders Association has forecast that the volume of cargo on U.S. roads will double. In Los Angeles, the freight volume is expected to triple as the population grows by 60 percent, producing strains that the U.S. chamber’s Kavinoky warned “will paralyze the city.”

Ian Grossman, the FHWA’s associate administrator for public affairs, lamented the Little League games