After a yearlong closure, a bridge over the Puyallup River reopened in 2019 with a sturdy new span and a brand new name. It even won a national award.
But today, the Fishing Wars Memorial Bridge is closed again after federal officials raised concerns about a vintage section of the nearly century-old bridge that carried about 15,000 vehicles a day. It has no timetable to reopen because the city of Tacoma, Washington, first must raise millions of dollars to clean and inspect it.
About 42,400 U.S. bridges are in poor condition, yet they carry about 167 million vehicles each day, according to the federal government. Four-fifths of them have problems with the legs holding them up or the arms supporting their load. And more than 15,800 of those bridges also were in poor shape a decade ago, according to an Associated Press analysis.
One of those persistently poor bridges — carrying about 96,000 westbound vehicles daily on Interstate 195 over the Seekonk River in Rhode Island — was suddenly shut to traffic late last year, resulting in long delays as drivers diverted to new routes. In March, the governor announced that the bridge must be demolished and replaced. That could cost up to $300 million and take at least two years to complete.
It’s frustrating — and hard to comprehend how we got here
We got here due to the massive build-out of suburbia and car dependency. We built tens of thousands of massive bridges that we couldn’t afford and we never budgeted money to maintain them.
Car bridges are frankly just too expensive. It’d be a lot easier to fund a way out of this backlog if we built fewer, smaller car bridges and then built out transportation capacity with rail bridges. Lower and narrower car and rail drawbridges would be much cheaper than the 4, 6, and 8 lane behemoths currently rotting away.
Yeah. If you compare toll roads to free highways, you find that the toll roads are generally better maintained because there are dedicated funds set aside to maintaining the highway.
Of course, these tolls are politically unpopular because it is a use tax and the big users don’t want to pay.
There was a Republican gubernatorial candidate here in Washington that ran on ending tolls. One of my very Republican relatives agreed with how badly we needed to get rid of tolls…despite living in an area without any. You’d think the party of personal responsibility would be all for paying for services you use.
I don’t get it. Didn’t Trump do Infrastructure Week? Shouldn’t that have solved the problem forever?
That’s in two weeks.
It always is, isn’t it?
Forever and eternity.
It has nothing to do with car dependency. Just like every other public project in the USA, if it isn’t immediately broken, then they just “defer maintenance” and allocate that spending to somewhere else. I like nice art statues. I like a bridge that doesn’t collapse more. If you can’t afford to maintain and fix a bridge, you can’t afford your budget. Either increase taxes or decrease spending. But deferring these costs and stealing from the coffers because it won’t be your problem later should be criminal.
