This is the third article in the series on U.S. infrastructure, following our aviation article, “Three Square Miles of Concrete." The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) assigned the United States’ BRIDGES infrastructure a grade of “C” on their 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.
While a “C” denotes just average, the BRIDGES category actually has the highest grade of all fifteen infrastructure categories on the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.
In the United States there are approximately 600,000 bridges which are catalogued and routinely inspected. This is encouraging from the perspective of someone who drives over many bridges during daily life, as most of us do.