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Only three weeks ago CBS had filed a four-part series The Road Ahead on problems with the highway system, including a report by Nancy Cordes on repair shortfalls. Back then she concentrated on potholes; now Cordes recycled some of the same footage to focus on bridges--those "built in the boom years of the Eisenhower era have entered middle age and, thanks to neglect, they are not aging gracefully," she generalized. NBC's Lisa Myers estimated that the bill for repairing the nation's entire stock of substandard bridges at $65bn--the states with the worst problems being Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Age is not the only problem, Myers reported; they are also used by heavier traffic than their designers envisaged.
ABC's Ned Potter (subscription required) took A Closer Look at infrastructure in general, citing a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Potter quoted the statistics that fully one third of the 40,000 annual traffic deaths "can be blamed at least in part on the nation's crumbling bridges and roads." The engineers assess the electricity grid and water and sewage systems as in an even worse state of repair than bridges.
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