Bridge Infrastructure - Immigration and Infrastructure
By Edwin S. Rubenstein
Volume 19, Number 2 (Winter 2008-2009)
Issue theme: "The Twin Crises - Immigration and Infrastructure"
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Keywords: immigration public infrastructure bridge funding cost population growth
In August 2007, a horrific incident forced the American public and the nation’s leaders to take a close look at the state of the country’s highway bridges. The collapse of the eight-lane bridge in Minneapolis carrying Interstate-35W over the Mississippi took the lives of 13 people and injured more than 100 others. Although the 40-year-old steel structure had been considered “structurally deficient” since 1990, engineers with the Minnesota Department of Transportation did not believe that the bridge was in danger of imminent failure.
Mary E. Peters, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, spoke for most of us when, at a news conference after the disaster, she declared that “Bridges in America should not fall down.” In fact, bridges do collapse—and at greater rates than you might think. Some 1,500 U. S. bridges collapsed between 1966 and 2005, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).1 More than 60 percent of these failures are traceable to soil erosion around bridges during floods. Ship collisions, overloads, design flaws, corrosion, and poor maintenance are among other causes. Unanticipated bridge traffic, which could arguably be blamed on immigration, does not seem to be a contributing factor.
More than 70,000 bridges are rated structurally deficient, like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis. They carry an average of more than 300 million vehicles per day.2 While it is unclear how many of them pose actual safety risks, structurally deficient bridges are closed or restricted to light vehicles because of their deteriorated structural components. Another bridge classification—the functionally obsolete bridge—is described by ASCE as having older design features that make it unable to safely accommodate current traffic volumes, vehicle sizes, and weights.
The news about bridges is not all bad, however. Another report—the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ (BTS) Condition of U.S. Highway Bridges: 1990–2007—indicated that nearly 42 percent of all highway bridges were classified as structurally deficient 17 years ago. By mid-August 2007, however, the combined number of structurally deficient and functionally obsolete bridges had decreased to 25.6 percent of all bridges, even as the total number of bridges increased by nearly 5 percent to approximately 600,000 structures, the BTS report noted.3
As of 2003, 27.1 percent of the nation’s bridges (160,570) were structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. In that year, however, one in three urban bridges—a much higher rate than the national average—was in those categories.
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Do immigrants use highway bridges at greater rates than natives? Probably not. But given the role of immigration in U.S. population growth, it is not unreasonable to expect that immigrants and their U.S.-born children account for a disproportionate share of the rise in urban bridge traffic.
https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_19_2/tsc_19_2_bridge.shtml
jeeze they were even using immigration numbers in calculations for the breakdown of infrastructure, bridges specifically in this article