As Jobs Bill Lingers, Nearly 70,000 Bridges Need Repair

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 19, 6:44AM EDT

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One of the largest parts of the Obama administration’s new bill to create jobs is a plan to put hundreds of thousands of people to work repairing the nation’s infrastructure. A report on the country’s bridges by Transportation for America is several months old now, but it is worth a new look as Congress debates a jobs bill.

TFA found that nearly 70,000 American bridges were “structurally deficient,” which means that they need major repair or replacement. This is nearly 12% of all the bridges in the country. It is fair to suppose that some of these bridges are dangerous. A large bridge collapses occasionally, and some of these accidents have been fatal.

It is easy to put off infrastructure upgrades. Pot holes and small cracks in bridges or highways do not mean imminent catastrophe. But that is true only until it isn’t. Public officials often do not act until a situation becomes so dire that public safety is involved. This is especially so when federal, state and local governments are under pressure to spend as little as possible. Deficits at some government levels, it is fair to say, are so high that they threaten even basic services like police forces. Bridges are not in the same class of problems.

The Federal Highway Administration estimated in 2009 that it would take $70.9 billion to make repairs to the backlog of deficient bridges. That number seems low, given the extent of the problem. Estimates of the cost to bring the entire U.S. public infrastructure up to grade range as high as $7 trillion. Maybe the bridge projects are so inexpensive that they could be slipped into some congressional bill in which repairs are not the primary object.

Austerity has its drawbacks. The one most frequently mentioned is that cuts in government expenses can put more people out of work. The nation’s bridge problem pales in comparison, as long as the bridges do not start to fall at a rate at which the trouble cannot be ignored. That makes it like all the other essential government problems that have been swept under the rug.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.