The Truth About America’s Crumbling Infrastructure

The Truth About America’s Crumbling Infrastructure

Michael S

Signs that we were once a truly great nation are all around us.  Previous generations of Americans handed us the keys to the most magnificent domestic infrastructure that the world had ever seen, but now it is literally falling apart all around us.  Thousands of bridges are structurally deficient and there have already been some very high profile collapses.  Hundreds of thousands of miles of highways and roads in the United States are in very poor shape.  Aging sewer systems are leaking raw sewage all over the place, and children are being slowly poisoned by lead pipes that desperately need to be replaced.  The power grid is hopelessly overloaded and is extremely vulnerable.  Meanwhile, our ports, our dams, our subway systems, our bus terminals and our airports are crumbling right in front of our eyes.  The truth is that our nation’s infrastructure says a lot about who we are.  So what does America’s crumbling infrastructure say about us?  Sadly, it says that we are a rusting, crumbling, decaying leftover from a better, more prosperous time.

Congress passed a bill that gave the Biden administration more than $100,000,000,000 to spend on fixing our infrastructure.

Honestly, I have no idea what they did with all that money.

In 2021, the official White House website was reporting that 45,000 bridges and 20 percent of our roads were in poor condition…

More than 45,000 U.S. bridges and 1 in 5 miles of roads are in poor condition, per the American Society of Civil Engineers. In 2007, the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed during rush hour, killing 13 and injuring 121.

Well, fast forward a few years later and the Department of Transportation is still telling us that “over 40,000 bridges” are in poor condition…

The Department of Transportation considers 6.8% of the over 600,000 bridges it tracks and rates to be in “poor” condition. That doesn’t sound too bad on a percentage basis, but it’s over 40,000 bridges in total.

And it appears that the condition of our roads has actually gotten worse in many states.

For example, Consumer Reports says that almost half of all urban roads in the state of California are not currently in acceptable condition…

Despite an enormous yearly disbursement for highways that tops $21 billion, the Golden State manages to keep just a little more than half their urban roads in acceptable condition. However, this is an outsized job since, in addition to 840 miles of coastline, California boasts more miles of urban roads than any other state and has the second-highest mileage of rural roads in the country.

Data from the National Highway Administration shows California’s roads are the most traveled in the U.S., so it makes sense that the state also has the second-highest number of motor vehicle-related fatalities in the country.

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