Bridge Tracker: Can You Bear to Hear the Truth?
Sustainable communities need to have sustainable infrastructure. Now you can check the safety of the bridges you cross in upstate New York — or anywhere else in the U.S.
This MSNBC map shows the condition and inspection dates for more than 100,000 bridges in the U.S. that are crossed by at least 10,000 vehicles per day. The records come from the latest National Bridge Inventory, as analyzed by msnbc.com. Inspections through 2006 are included. Only bridges, on/off ramps and overpasses within .2 miles of your chosen route are shown. The locations were provided by state departments of transportation. Some states are more accurate than others in mapping their bridges.
Go to the Bridge Tracker, and just type in a hypothetical trip, say, from Buffalo to Albany. How many bridges along that route are structurally deficient? Obsolete? Or just OK? When was each bridge built? When was it last inspected? It’s all there at the Bridge Tracker, and some of the information might persuade you to hold onto that steering wheel a little tighter on your next road trip.
For the full story on bridge inspections, go to http://bridges.msnbc.com.
How will we pay for sustainable bridge infrastructure in the Empire State? Indeed, what will sustainable infrastructure (roads, bridges, water, sewer, power, telecommunications) even look like in this, the twenty-first century? Will we even be driving cars and trucks on roads at all fifty years from now? (…And if that time horizon simply seems too far “out there,” just take a look at the MSNBC bridge map and you’ll see that many of the bridges we drive on today are already 50 years old — and older!)
Indeed, ‘tomorrow’ is today, and it’s going to take a lot of brains and money to get us out of this pickle. I hope we can come back to this critical issue in future posts. Meanwhile, what are your ideas?
News & Views | Chris Nill | 31 July 2008 |
