Author Topic: 11 Deeply Alarming Facts About America’s Crumbling Infrastructure  (Read 9870 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline HAPPY2BME

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 5617
  • Reputation: +100/-231
  • For The People And By The People


#1 According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, nearly 56,000 bridges in the United States are currently “structurally deficient”.  What makes that number even more chilling is the fact that vehicles cross those bridges a total of 185 million times a day.

#2 More than one out of every four bridges in the United States is more than 50 years old and “have never had major reconstruction work”.

#3 America does not have a single airport that is considered to be in the top 25 in the world.

#4 The average age of America’s dams is now 52 years.

#5 Not too long ago, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the condition of America’s dams a “D” grade.

#6 Overall, the American Society of Civil Engineers said that the condition of America’s infrastructure as a whole only gets a “D+” grade.

#7 Congestion on our highways costs Americans approximately 101 billion dollars a year in wasted fuel and time.

#8 According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, over two-thirds of our roads are “in dire need of repair or upgrades”.

#9 In order to completely fix all of our roads and bridges, it would take approximately 808 billion dollars.

#10 Federal spending on infrastructure has decreased by 9 percent over the past decade.

#11 According to Bloomberg, it is being projected “that by 2025, shortfalls in infrastructure investment will subtract as much as $3.9 trillion from U.S. gross domestic product.”

The quality of our infrastructure affects all of our lives every single day.  For instance, we all simply take it for granted that safe, clean drinking water is going to come out of our taps, but recent events have shown that is not necessarily always going to be the case.


http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/11-deeply-alarming-facts-about-americas-crumbling-infrastructure

Offline Adam Wood

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 790
  • Reputation: +75/-28
Re: 11 Deeply Alarming Facts About America’s Crumbling Infrastructure
« Reply #1 on: February 18, 2017, 07:58:48 PM »
#1 According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, nearly 56,000 bridges in the United States are currently “structurally deficient”.  What makes that number even more chilling is the fact that vehicles cross those bridges a total of 185 million times a day.
Aaaannnnd, this is how we know that the entire blog is bullshit.

This same bullshit claim has been parroted with shrieking alarm since at least 2006, thoroughly convincing lots of people that every single bridge in the United States is about to fall down, almost entirely because of the term "structurally deficient."  That term does not even remotely mean what these ludicrous alarmists pretend that it means.  It does not mean that a bridge is crumbling away right under people's wheels.  It means that there is some feature of the bridge in question that does not meet some sort of "ideal" specification, and has basically nothing to do with the safety of the actual bridge at all.  Back about ten years ago, we had a brand new bridge built here in Nashville, and it was literally "structurally deficient" the moment that it was completed.  Why? Because the shoulders on the bridge are necessarily (because of the geography) one inch narrower than ideal DOT specifications.  But people freak out and think that this brand new bridge is going to fall down at any moment.


This perpetual claim that "America's infrastructure is crumbling" is grade-A unadulterated bullshit.  This meme is pushed by people who have a vested interest in getting a shit-ton of federal dollars bulldozed down a black hole of Democrat cronyism.  No, America's infrastructure is not "crumbling."  It's largely just fine.  Are there some bridges and roads that need attention?  Absolutely.  But almost all of those that do are state and local issues, not federal matters.  I-440 in Nashville is an embarrassing shambles, but that's a local issue created by Democrats in Nashville's city government, not the fault of the last few Presidents and Congresses. 

If we really need $808B for infrastructure, then it should all already be just fine because we threw a trillion dollars into failulous, so all of those "shovel-ready projects" should already have taken care of all of that allegedly crumbling infrastructure.

Offline nomad54

  • Just Off Probation
  • *
  • Posts: 113
  • Reputation: +9/-1
Re: 11 Deeply Alarming Facts About America’s Crumbling Infrastructure
« Reply #2 on: February 19, 2017, 09:02:47 PM »
Power infrastructure is what concerns me, especially with all these yahoos plugging in their electric cars.