The infrastructure in the U.S. is in a deep state of decay as these 21 facts will show!
Living in the New York metropolitan area I have the distinct pleasure of driving on two of the worst roads in the country, the Cross Bronx Expressway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
I also have the honor of spending between $8 and $15 every time I go over or through a bridge or tunnel that's covered in rust and with roadbeds that seem as if they are only held together by metal plates.
My car is pummeled by potholes and decay and then partially submerged during storms due to poor sewers and drainage.
This is a story is repeated across the country where infrastructure needs are opposed by severe budgetary limitations faced by state, city and town governments.
21 U.S. infrastructure facts!
#1 The American Society of Civil Engineers has given
America's crumbling infrastructure an overall grade of D.
#2 There are simply not enough roads in the United
States today. Each year, traffic jams cost the commuters of America 4.2 billion
hours and about 2.8 million
gallons of gasoline.
#3 It is being projected that Americans will spend an
average of 160 hours stuck
in traffic annually by the year 2035.
#4 Approximately one-third of all
roads in the United States are in substandard condition.
#5 Close to a third of
all highway fatalities are due "to substandard road conditions, obsolete
road designs, or roadside hazards."
#6 One out of every four bridges
in America either carries more traffic than originally intended or is in need
of repair.
#7 Repairing all of the bridges in the United States
that need repair would take approximately 140 billion
dollars.
#8 According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, our
decaying transportation system costs the U.S. economy about78 billion
dollars annually in lost time and fuel.
#9 All over America, asphalt roads are being ground up
and are being replaced with gravel roads because they
are cheaper to maintain. The state of South Dakota has
transformed over 100 miles of asphalt roads into gravel roads, and 38 out of
the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have transformed at least some of
their asphalt roads into gravel roads.
#10 There are 4,095 dams
in the United States that are at risk of failure. That number has risen
by more than 100
percent since 1999.
#11 Of all the dam failures that have happened in the
United States since 1874, a third of them have
happened during the past decade.
#12 Close to half of
all U.S. households do not have access to bus or rail transit.
#13 Our aging sewer systems spill more than a trillion gallons of
untreated sewage every single year. The cost of cleaning up that sewage
each year is estimated to be greater than 50 billion dollars.
#14 It is estimated that rolling blackouts and
inefficiencies in the U.S. electrical grid cost the U.S. economy approximately 80 billion
dollars a year.
#15 It is being projected that by the year
2020 every single major container port in the United States
will be handling at least double the volume that it was originally designed to
handle.
#16 All across the United States, conditions at many of
our state parks, recreation areas and historic sites are deplorable at
best. Some states have backlogs of repair projects that are now over a
billion dollars long....
More than a dozen states estimate that their backlogs are at
least $100 million. Massachusetts and New York's are at least $1 billion.
Hawaii officials called park conditions "deplorable" in a December
report asking for $50 million per year for five years to tackle a $240 million
backlog that covers parks, trails and harbors.
#17 Today, the U.S. spends about 2.4 percent of GDP on
infrastructure. Meanwhile, China spends about 9 percent of GDP on
infrastructure.
#18 In the United States today, approximately
16 percent of our construction workers are unemployed.
#19 China has plans to build 55,000 miles of highways by the year
2020. If all of those roads were put end to end, it would be
longer than the total length of the entire U.S. interstate system.
#20 The World Economic Forum ranks U.S. infrastructure 23rd in the world,
and we fall a little bit farther behind the rest of the developed world every
single day.
#21 It has been projected that it would take 2.2 trillion dollars over
the next 5 years just to repair our existing infrastructure. That does
not even include a single penny for badly needed new infrastructure.
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