Bridges fall, blame a republican (the party of the functionally obsolete)

Before the Interstate 35W Bridge over The Mississippi River in Minneapolis fell, two rural republican congressmen from Pennsylvania decided to block efforts to add tolls to Interstate 80. While I am not a great fan toll roads - particularly the open system of tolling that is being proposed for I-80 - I understand that, pragmatically, the money for mass transit and infrastructure funding needs to come from somewhere. Given that I rarely ever drive I-80 (I don't think I've ever driven it, to be honest), the fact that they were going to toll the road to free up money for other aspects of the transportation budget was not a particularly bitter pill to swallow.

Of course, one can always depend on a republican, or in this case, a set of republicans: Phil English and John Peterson, to screw things up. These two denizens of Dogpatch (actually Erie and Venango, respectively, but all of rural Pennsylvania is pretty much the same wasteland) have inserted an amendment into the federal transportation spending bill which would prohibit tolling I-80. They claim that their country-fried brethren should not have to pay for urban mass transit, and that tolling I-80 would have a deleterious effect on the economy of rural Pennsylvania. What these two half-wits seem to miss is the fact that the money resulting from tolls on I-80 would go towards infrastructure in the entire state and, furthermore, attempting to hurt the economy of rural Pennsylvania is akin to stabbing a cadaver and hoping for a scream. Traffic on I-80 is headed through the state, on it's way to either New York City or Cleveland - no one is stopping at any of the little towns which dot it's corridor, because there is no reason to stop there!

Obviously I was enraged by the actions of these two congressmen; having lived in a rural area for fifteen years, once I moved to a city, I was under the impression that I would no longer be directly affected by the proverbial "Cletus and his inbred brother." Instead, I've come to find that rural representatives have far too much sway in Pennsylvania. If the legislature is to be cut - and it should be - they should start with every drooling, slack-jawed dirt-eater from Dogpatch who wants to take away my mass transit, or barring that, overcharge those who not only opt to use it, but have to use it.

Then the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge fell...

My first thought upon hearing this was, "shit...who fucked up?" Immediately, the light bulb came back on: where is the money going? Well, if it's not fixing levees in New Orleans and it's not fixing bridges in Minneapolis then it must be getting wasted in the Middle East. My second though was that congressmen Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum from rural Pennsylvania will have to back down on their anti-toll crusade seeing as how the money would be used to refurbish infrastructure, including bridges. To date, however, they haven't backed down.

Recently, a website appeared with a Google Maps mashup detailing the sufficiency ratings of bridges in the United States. Combining information from the National Bridge Inventory database found on the US Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration website with the Google Maps API, USBridgeMap.com is a sobering, and downright frightening look at how poorly maintained the nation's infrastructure is. A look at some bridges around where I live, some of which I use daily:

Liberty Bridge, built 1928; rating 37.3% (functionally obsolete)
Smithfield Street Bridge, built 1883; rating 45.6% (functionally obsolete)
10^th Street Bypass, built 2002; rating 77.8%
Bigelow Boulevard (approach to downtown), built 1960; rating 59% (structurally deficient)
9^th Street Bridge, built 1926; rating 64.2% (functionally obsolete)
7^th Street Bridge, built 1926; rating 53.1% (functionally obsolete)
6^th Street Bridge, built 1928; rating unknown (functionally obsolete)
Fort Duquesne Bridge (I-279), built 1959; rating 59.7% (structurally deficient)
Fancourt Street (ramp from I-279), built 1930; rating unknown (structurally deficient)

It does not take a math major to see that those numbers aren't particularly impressive. What really drives it home was the fact that last week, joi_division and I were sitting in traffic on the 10^th Street Bridge, far enough back to actually be over the water. As we were waiting for the light to turn green, three large cement mixers turned onto the bridge, heading the opposite direction. As each truck passed us, we could feel the bridge bouncing like a trampoline. While the roadgeek in me knows that bridges are supposed to have certain structural tolerances, Joi and I still looked at each other with the same thought on our minds: get us the fuck off this thing! My only hope is that obstructionists Phil English and John Peterson find themselves trapped on a bridge when the inevitable consequence of underfunding occurs.