Here is an interesting statistic I ran across this morning: the US yearly cost to repair existing bridges/roads is around $20.5 Billion. Over last 10 yrs, Congress has okayed $158 BILLION for new roads/bridges in Iraq and Afghanistan. Diving into this further, we hit the real critical stat: Of the 600,000 bridges in the US, almost 8000 are deemed structurally deficient and fracture critical meaning that there is no redundant steel element of the bridge to prevent the weaker portion from collapsing. $0.18 of every gallon of gas goes to servicing our roads and bridges. That percentage has stayed the same for 20 years. The unsafe bridges will cause trucks to take longer routes which will elevate the cost of shipments over time. So you can see that this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed for safety and long term economic reasons.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 15:28:56 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015