Inspection notices

The collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis seems to have prompted a wave of bridge inspections. The paper reports today that:

Four of Delaware’s most vulnerable bridges will be inspected every six months instead of every year as a precaution in the wake of last week’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

Sixteen other Delaware bridges with outdated “fracture critical” designs like the bridge in Minnesota will be examined more frequently, state Department of Transportation Secretary Carolann Wicks said Tuesday. Fracture critical means that the failure of a single beam or pin could cause the entire bridge to collapse.

This seems like a prudent step. Is it partly motivated by an attempt to shape public perception? Probably, but that’s part of what makes democracy work.

DelDOT’s public response was certainly more capable than that of PennDOT. Here in Pennsylvania, Transportation Secretary Allen Biehler’s initial response was to refuse to provide the public with the ratings of bridges in the state (information already available from the Federal Highway Administration). Biehler’s rationale was that he didn’t want people to panic, mistaking the “structurally deficient” rating of 6,000 Pa. bridges as an indication that those bridges were not safe to drive over:

Biehler said motorists should not be alarmed by the ratings. He said a low rating does not mean a bridge is unsafe. The ratings will vary from zero to nine.

Biehler said, “I can assure you that I will not hesitate to cross a bridge with a low rating.” He also said, “A low rating does not mean a bridge is unsafe. If there were any unsafe conditions, the bridges would be closed.”

This was just dumb. Biehler — like Bush and Cheney — insists he was just trying to protect the public by withholding information from them, but this is not how democracy works. Government secrecy is, by definition, undemocratic. Transparency is essential for accountability.

I appreciate Biehler’s point that “structurally deficient” does not necessarily mean “unsafe.” (I expect some Luntzian bureaucrat will soon propose a new taxonomy for these ratings with less pejorative-sounding euphemisms like “sub-optimally secure.”) A structurally deficient rating does mean, however, that a bridge is, you know, structurally deficient — and that’s something the public has a right to know.

Biehler’s reluctance to provide this information is also dumb because it makes it harder for him to do his job. There’s no such thing as free bridge maintenance. Fixing Pennsylvania’s 6,000 deficient bridges will cost money that will have to come out of Biehler’s budget. If he wants the public to pay for this, he needs us to appreciate that this money is actually needed. Biehler doesn’t seem to understand that informing the public about this need — providing as much information as possible about what needs to be done, where and why — is the only way that he can hope to marshal support for getting it done.

Across the bridge in New Jersey, where I grew up, Lou Magazzu seems to understand this. Jersey is, predictably, embroiled in a jurisdictional struggle over who will fix its many deficient bridges and who will pay for it.

Magazzu, a freeholder in Cumberland County, is head of the states association of counties. County governments in the Garden State are responsible for about 7,000 bridges rated structurally deficient. Most of these are small, but about 900 are major bridges that carry an enormous amount of Jersey’s prodigious traffic. Fixing them, Magazzu says, will cost about $2.7 billion over ten years and the counties just don’t have that kind of money. The counties don’t even have the capacity to raise that kind of money, Magazzu says, since their only source of revenue is property taxes.

So the counties want the state to provide the funds, but Trenton says it doesn’t have the money either. Magazzu, having a shrewder understanding than Allen Biehler of how democracy works in our mass media society, thus made a beeline for every microphone he could find and began making the counties’ case, doing his best to frame the issue. He’s quoted in a half-dozen newspaper articles today, but his best line isn’t in print. I heard this on the radio — from WHYY’s local news report on NPR:

“If there is no action by the state, we can make signs, and we can put a sign up that says, ‘This bridge is structurally deficient as determined by the D.O.T. Call your state legislator.'”

I actually like this idea, not just as a tactic in Jersey’s jurisdictional squabble, but for the whole country. I’d like to see this implemented nationwide as part of the National Bridge Inventory process. Let’s put up signs on every bridge — the equivalent of those inspection notices in every elevator — clearly informing the public of each bridge’s rating as provided by the inspectors and engineers from the FHA.

This would help to address the longer-term issue here. The main problem is not that we have 147,913 structurally deficient bridges in America. The deeper problem is that we do not seem to have a reliable maintenance system in place for this essential aspect of our infrastructure. Deferred infrastructure maintenance, like deferred health care, winds up being more expensive in the long run. We need to do more than just fix 147,913 bridges. We need to put in place a system that can perform, and fund, regular and ongoing maintenance and repair. Doing that will require convincing the public this is worthwhile, and that will require educating the public about the scope of this task.

I think Magazzu’s signs would be an excellent part of that public education.

Infrastructure doesn’t grow on trees. Bridges — like electricity, rail and sewage systems — cost money. These are public goods so that means public money, so that means taxes and tolls. (Privatization doesn’t change that. Whether bridge construction/maintenance is done by the D.O.T. or by Halliburton, the money for it comes from the same place.)

Because this involves taxes, some people will try to make this about ideology — about some supposed Cold War struggle between laissez faire capitalism and socialism. But this isn’t about markets or socialism, it’s about bridges.

One of the better sources of information on infrastructure issues is the Reason Foundation. Yes, that Reason Foundation — the libertarian “free minds and free markets” people. Check out their research and recommendations on transportation, the upshot of which is that our infrastructure is underfunded.