#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.