American Bridges Are Falling Apart and There’s No Plan To Fix Them
On July 31, 2024, the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT) informed travelers via social media that the Fairfax Bridge would be load restricted for the foreseeable future. Vehicles larger than SUVs are encouraged to seek alternative routes, meaning that RVs and campers can no longer enjoy views of the picturesque Carbon River. Even for “lighter” vehicles, however, the accompanying photos appeared to suggest, “drive at your own risk.”
Worse yet, the post revealed that there’s no vision for funding the rehabilitation or replacement of the century-old structure. “Some of you will want to know if we plan on replacing this bridge,” the agency wrote. “The answer is complicated.”
The Fairfax Bridge is just one of hundreds of bridges in need of urgent attention in Washington. The state’s bridges received a grade of C+ in the latest Infrastructure Report Card put out by the American Society of Civil Engineers. While it wasn't the worst grade that year — Louisiana scored a D+ — it exposed how dire the situation was in the Evergreen State.
As of June 2023, 315 of WSDOT's 3,384 bridges were 80 years old or older, accounting for 9.3% of all state-owned bridges or approximately 3.41 million square feet of road. Some of the bridges celebrating their 90th birthday that year were only built for half that lifespan. For these nonagenarians, every minute counts. “Without more investment in preservation, we will continue to see more bridges weight-listed, longer detours (where applicable) and highways with “rough road ahead” signs,” WSDOT added on Facebook.
Weight or load restricting, like WSDOT recommended on Fairfax, is a last-ditch effort to slow the pace of deterioration. It doesn’t address the condition of the bridge whatsoever, but it attempts to buy time while disrupting as little vehicular traffic as possible.
Washington is full of bridges that have been weight restricted. Pierce County, home to the Fairfax Bridge, and Spokane County to the east both maintain lists of dozens of bridges that have been weight restricted because of “structural conditions” and “deficiencies revealed upon inspection.” Farther south, the Department of Public Works for Clark County even added some context as to why they implemented limits: “The majority of Clark County's bridges are 50 to 75 years old and were not designed or built to meet the current demands on the transportation system. Load restrictions slow the deterioration of bridges, protect the public's investment in transportation infrastructure and provide safe travel across bridges.”
Every year, another dozen bridges are weight restricted because of their condition and no plan to restore them is arranged. How did things get this bad?
The problem is multifold. Many of these bridges have been allowed to age past their lifespans without serious intervention. That’s not to say that WSDOT officials and concerned citizens haven’t been sounding the alarm. For example, the impending collapse of Seattle’s Ship Canal Bridge has been documented and debated for over a decade. At this point, there are literal chunks falling off the structure, but the city and state are paralyzed, citing the same excuses they did 10 years ago. It’s not that the excuses have no merit, but if the costs were a barrier back then, they’ve more than doubled by now, taking into account inflation and the added wear another decade wrought.
This inertia points to what WSDOT rightly identified as the main culprit: warped priorities. “For example, funding construction of a new section of highway may mean delaying needed bridge deck rehabilitation elsewhere,” the agency wrote in a document about its oldest bridges. “Such delays can be costly; if a bridge deck deteriorates to the point where replacement is the only option, the cost of restoring it to good condition may triple.”
In the last 30 years, when many of the now-crumbling bridges were only beginning to demand repair, WSDOT began over 60 new, arguably excessive projects. These include adding lanes to Interstate 90 for a price tag of $627 million, the $2.67 billion Puget Sound Gateway projects and, perhaps most famously, the boring of the State Route 99 — or Alaskan Way — tunnel in Seattle. When the Alaskan Way Tunnel broke ground in 2013, Washington received an overall grade of C- for its infrastructure. The 2-mile project ultimately cost over $3 billion.
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It’s not just that these projects diverted funds that could have otherwise gone toward maintaining the existing millions of miles of roadway in the state. They added to the state’s infrastructure liabilities. There are more square miles of road today in Washington than there were in 2010, 2000 or even 1990. That means the state is responsible for maintaining more square miles of road. If the state was struggling to maintain what it had in the past, it has even more to maintain now. And everything is older.
What’s at Stake?
Neighboring Oregon offers a peephole into what awaits Washington if it continues this way. The state is reportedly facing a $354 million shortfall that lawmakers and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) personnel are hoping to rectify with new taxes and fees. Last year, ODOT even announced it would reduce snow plowing as a cost-saving measure, endangering millions of commuters during the winter. Unsurprisingly, the public’s response was outrage and the agency was ultimately bailed out. However, it still hasn’t narrowed the gap, and ODOT is in exactly the same place today as it was last year.
“The problem with the ODOT budget is not a lack of funds to fix potholes and plow snow, but rather the exploding cost of highway widening megaprojects in the Portland Metropolitan Area,” City Observatory’s Joe Cortright, who has been tracking ODOT’s transportation projects, wrote. The cumulative cost of three Portland-area highway projects is nearly $10 billion, with the most expensive of them costing more than $1 billion per mile of roadway. Cortright found it insulting that in the wake of this “reckless spending,” the agency would consider reducing essential services like snow plowing. The agency didn’t even provide an estimate for how much they’d save in doing so.
Rather than scrap essential services, Cortright recommends that Oregon halt several impending projects in their tracks and focus on its maintenance backlog. Washington can do the same.
In fact, both states share a project that was singled out in the 2023 Highway Boondoggles Report: the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project, or IBR. As the report explains, the project is not simply a bridge replacement, “but rather a major freeway expansion that would almost double the size of the existing bridge while also rebuilding several freeway interchanges in the city of Vancouver and the city of Portland.” The sheer scale of the project appears overblown relative to the connectivity needs that both agencies are apparently interested in addressing. To add insult to injury, Cortright noted that the cost of the IBR recently doubled, bringing it up to $7.5 billion. Since both agencies are in search of money, they can start by reconsidering this “over-engineered and expensive solution looking for a problem.”
Of course, beyond financial concerns, there are the physical dangers that compound with every month maintenance is delayed on an old bridge. Many Washingtonians remember when, in 2012, the Interstate 5 bridge collapsed, sending two vehicles plunging 50 feet into the Skagit River. Miraculously, as one of the motorists put it, everyone survived, but the event put a spotlight on the state’s aging infrastructure.
Ahead of the collapse, the 58-year-old bridge received a sufficiency rating of 57.4 out of 100 and was labeled “functionally obsolete” by the Federal Highway Administration’s National Bridge Inventory. Yet, transportation officials were shocked when the bridge folded, even continuing to assert that it was healthy. For witnesses, it was nothing short of a miracle that a road that sees nearly 70,000 vehicles a day didn’t turn into a mass grave on that day in 2012.
Today, hundreds of bridges are as “healthy” as the collapsed I-5, and many more, like the Fairfax Bridge, are in far worse shape. Lives are at stake. It’s time DOTs acted like it.
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.