Good news: The United States had 56,000 structurally deficient bridges in 2016. That’s good news because the number in 2015 was nearly 59,000. In fact, the number has declined in every year since 1992 (the earliest year for which records are available), when it was 124,000.
The American Road and Transportation Builders thinks 2016’s number is a good reason to jump on the trillion-dollar infrastructure bandwagon in the hope that federal funds will be available to enrich its members. But this is a problem that is solving itself without any new federal programs.
The bad news is that highway fatalities in 2016 grew to more than 40,000, at least as reckoned by the National Safety Council. NSC’s numbers are about 7.5 percent higher than the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s because the latter only counts deaths that take place immediately after accidents, but still this is a cause for alarm because as it indicates a 15 percent since 2011, or about 5,000 people a year.
