This is actually part of the PROBLEM - with so many bridges on the "worst possible category" it becomes a bridge who cried wolf scenario. There is no way to highlight "yeah this one is going to fall down tomorrow" if the worst you can do is mark it "this bridge bad like 42k others".
You need some form of a "stop ship" where inspectors get some number of "no way, close this entirely" that they can use without repercussions or something.
I think this leans on a thing that I think of as the "law of average quality." The belief that there's some mark, near the middle, and things below that mark are bad, and things above that mark are good. It's something that is only true if you're comparing things against themselves. If there are any external goals for the things being discussed, almost everything can be bad (and correspondingly, almost everything can be good.)
I feel like this thought process leads to the "worst possible category" containing 42k bridges. The construction of the categories was based around whether the bridge is safe, and this category says "the bridge is not safe." It's when you put it off long enough, and let the infrastructure deteriorate long enough, that you start going "which is the most unsafe though?" Or, "is a safety factor even necessary? They are by definition a >1.0 factor applied to what we think is safe." Then, "one in a hundred year events" or "once in a decade events." Eventually it's "hasn't collapsed yet!"
The fact that the list got that big means our problem isn't prioritization, our problem is failing to repair bridges. Commit to and budget for repairing 42k bridges, then prioritize where you start.
They sort of do have that power. They have the ability to lower the max vehicle weight and eventually it gets lowered to where no real traffic can go over it. Grady talked about it in the video.
There is a catch-22 for such a judgement call. As bridges generally weigh far more than the traffic they carry, there isn't much room between a bridge that is too dangerous for traffic and one that is too dangerous for anything, including repair work.
There's a road near me that's been replaced by a large 4 lane state route. There's almost no reason to drive it as there are no houses or farm access. The bridge is being completely replaced. The road is closed during construction, and I think the only people impacted by it are the recreational bikers. A boondoggle while other bridges around the country are in dangerous disrepair. I wish we knew there was a sensible prioritization that was published for review by we the taxpayers.
Yes! I want a cost benefit analysis and to ask every stakeholder imaginable for any sort of road repair or expansion. The fact that not every repair or expansion has a single improvement for non car users is pitiful.
We need to hold road infrastructure to the same consideration as we do transit and rail. If we didn’t give it unlimited funding, then it would already be doing this.
We are wasting trillions and losing so much economic growth by doubling down on a bad investment year after year for decades. Imagine if this money was put into education or healthcare or transit. We’d actually have a net benefit!
> Imagine if this money was put into education or healthcare or transit. We’d actually have a net benefit!
Based on the evidence, it's hard to imagine that lack of money is the problem with those three things.
K-12 education in particular has seen more and more money spent over the decades while the number of students, teachers, and student outcomes have stayed more or less constant (the extra money mostly goes to administrators to administrate the extra money). Higher ed has gotten famously more expensive while delivering a poorer product, with grade inflation and recently a focus on worthless social activism diluting what it means to have a college degree at all.
On healthcare, the US already spends close to one-fifth of its GDP on it. Its per capita spend is over 50% higher than the next-highest country, Switzerland. And what do we have to show for this, other than an obesity rate exceeding one-third the population and diminishing life expectancies? I don't know how more money could possibly help this situation.
Transit only makes sense in a few cities (largely due to idiotic zoning that prevents the kind of densities that would enable transit) and even then, if you look at things like NYC's East Side Access project, it would be hard-pressed for a public works project to spend taxpayer money less efficiently. And to truly improve the transit experience would require a concomitant improvement in the social fabric, which is its own set of problems.
A big part of that is who pays - state and federal dollars that are unused go away, so they often find a program that can use it, even if it's not the best use of funds locally.
Local roads often don't qualify, but state and federal highways do.
You need some form of a "stop ship" where inspectors get some number of "no way, close this entirely" that they can use without repercussions or something.