Richmond-region bridges: pretty bad shape.
by James A. Bacon
Virginia supposedly prioritizes road and highway maintenance over new construction but the condition of the state’s bridges doesn’t appear to reflect it. According to a new report by Transportation for America, 9.1% of the bridges in the Old Dominion were rated “structurally deficient” in 2013. That wasn’t as bad as the worst offender, Pennsylvania, where 24.5% of the bridges are deficient, but it falls considerably short of Florida and Nevada, whose bridges are in the best condition nationally, with only 2.2% deficient.
Northern Virginia bridges. (Click for larger image.)
When ranked by the average daily traffic on those deficient bridges, Virginia does even worse, scoring 8th in the country — 7.4 million riders cross bad bridges in the Old Dominion every day.
If there’s any consolation, Virginia did manage to whittle down the number of deficient bridges by 21 between 2011 and 2013 — to 1,251, an improvement of 1.7%.
Norfolk bridges. (Click for larger image.)
What’s worrisome is that bridge repair is stalling — the nation repaired one-third the number of bridges over the past four years that it did between 1992 and 1996. Meanwhile, a big chunk of the nation’s transportation infrastructure is reaching its average designed lifespan. The average bridge is designed to last 50 years. The average bridge age today is 43 years. The average age of structurally deficient bridges is 65 years. In a decade, states Transportation for America, one in four of the nation’s bridges will be 65 years or older. Making matters worse, Congress last year eliminated a dedicated fund for bridge repair, forcing bridge repair to compete with other transportation needs.
How about the bridges that you drive on? Check out Transportation for America’s cool interactive map. That’s where I captured the images for this blog post. What the map tells you, and these images can’t, is when a bridge was built, when it was last inspected, and what its ratings were for deck, superstructure and substructure.
Update: Under the new Six Year Improvement Program approved by the Commonwealth Transportation Board Wednesday, Virginia will spent nearly $2.3 billion to upgrade bridges over the next six years, reports the Times-Dispatch. Said Secretary of Transportation Sean Connaughton: “There’s a large backlog of bridge maintenance projects that we’re now going to be able to get to.”
That raises a question. If there’s a large backlog of bridge maintenance projects, is VDOT living up to its statutory obligation to repair and maintain existing roads before building new ones?
Charlottesville bridges. (Click for larger image.)
Lynchburg bridges. (Click for larger image.)
Roanoke bridges. (Click for larger image.)
