That’s a lot of news….what’s it all mean? The Waring blender

In transportation – on the public side, highways, bridges, transit, roads – the relationship between federal, state and local allocation of funding and tracking of that funding is complex and sometimes confounding.

This should come as no surprise, our states and cities are huge economic enterprises (it is often noted that California if considered separately from the US would rank as the 13th largest country-sized economy in the world, and I believe that the GDP of some of our major cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles – might make the list as well.)

This speaks to the point that these are complex systems within themselves – city, state, federal – with only modest gains in integrating their complexities BETWEEN themselves.

The point comes to mind in reading the most recent GAO report on the condition of the nation’s bridges, which notes real improvement, but nonetheless is hard to measure because there is no comprehensive and complementary data for state and local bridge spending.

Some background on the subject, the data is ready at hand, we’re in the top tier in bridge design and bridge inspection, so some of this is etched on the brain. There’s about 650,000 bridges in the US, carrying passenger car, trucking, bus transit, and commercial vehicle traffic over rivers and lakes, highways, railways and all other road obstructions. (As with all things on the public side of the transportation economy, note how powerful a component these are to the success of the private side….freight rail, trucking, all elements of the supply chain and logistics depend just as thoroughly on the good repair of these bridges as the public side does.)

The states own about half, the cities the other half. (Federal owns a mere 2%, mostly on federally owned land.)

Nearly one in four bridges is rated as deficient, which isn’t nearly as alarming as it appears. That deficiency might express itself as simply being within several years of its scheduled design life, or more typically as functionally obsolete, in other words bridges with poor traffic configuration, those that have been overtaken by population growth, those that are poorly designed for the makeup of the traffic that they now carry…these too are rated deficient.

No transportation professional is going to leave a dangerously deficient bridge standing. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that overall, the nation’s stock of bridges were undergoing deterioration that subsequently required funding to reverse.

There’s been a commendable decline in the overall number of deficient bridges, due primarily to the reduction tin the first of the categories mentioned above, the structurally deficient variety. That category has gone from 96,263 in 1998 to 72,388 today.

Much of this is due to the ongoing attention of transportation officials in each of the state departments of Transportation, it’s also been observed that funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act have found application in the bridge sector. Total funds for the highway portion of the ARRA were $26.7 billion, $3.2 billion of that has come to bridges (including 61 new bridges, 644 bridge replacements, and 554 bridge improvements.)

It’s discouraging that the data isn’t clear enough by way of non-integrated data tracking between states and cities to determine where the money is having the highest impact and it being best spent. Until those criteria can be determined, it will be hard to prioritize future spending in any reasonable way.

The Surface Transportation Bill, long overdue for renewal, is the vehicle for great swaths of spending in transportation, federal funds often account for 80% of any project’s design and construction, with the state (or sometimes city) required to come up with matching funds at the 20% level.) That bill will certainly contain significant sums for bridges, so the matter is pressing. Not only that, the number of bridges in need of repair or rehabilitation is expected to increase as many of the bridges built in the 60s and 70s approach the end of their design life.

Transportation is coming under more pressure in the face of the current economic environment. States are having the worst years since the Great Depression in terms of tax revenues, and more than one city or state has had to turn away federal funds because they couldn’t muster the match money (recall that is only at the 20% level.)

Counties face some of the same issues, now comes word that counties in some states are in the process of converting at least some of the roads under their span of control from asphalt back to gravel, the surfacing method of choice 40 years ago,

Degrading under the load of more traffic than they were built to bear, and heavier traffic (farm combines, trucks, and logging vehicles) decision-makers are willing to see them convert back to a state consistent with the original intent of the route, which in any event, costs far less to maintain.

To the same point, this straightened state and city financial capacity, I don’t believe the reader knows whether to be more alarmed that VDOT has drastically cut its mowing budget in half (from $42 million to $22 million) with the subsequent overgrowth of grasses and weeds along the medians….or charmed that common citizens by the score have offered their services to maintain the highways and roads on their own for free.

You know, cities and states started this way, community efforts thrown together to attack a common cause, everyone pitching in. It would be ironic indeed if at this stage of the game we were finally rediscovering those qualities. – Larry McGurn