Nearly 35 million people unwittingly drive over structurally deficient bridges every day in Los Angeles.
In addition to "structurally deficient, " another bridge classification is "functionally obsolete, " according to the Federal Highway Administration.
Structurally deficient, Stidger said, generally means the bridge can't carry the traffic it was designed to accommodate.
In 2005, in fact, they found that 156, 000 bridges were structurally deficient or, as they said, functionally obsolete.
According to the 2008 American Society of Civil Engineers infrastructure report, 57% of Rhode Island's bridges are structurally deficient.
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Minnesota Department of Transportation bridge engineer Dan Dorgan said the term "structurally deficient" is a Federal Highway Administration rating.
Arizona and Rhode Island have a similar number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges -- 384 and 405 respectively.
The United States ranks 16th in the world in infrastructure quality, with one in four bridges in America considered structurally deficient.
Casey Dinges, a staff leader on the report card, said "structurally deficient" and "functionally obsolete" are technical terms used by the federal government.
As of 2010 there were 7, 980 bridges in our nation (an average of 160 per state) that are both structurally deficient and fracture critical.
"A structurally deficient condition is a bridge that would have a rating of 4 either in the deck, the superstructure or the substructure, " he said.
The number of bridges the state's transportation department considers structurally deficient has grown nearly 50% in the past six years, according to a 2012 government report.
So tonight, I propose a "Fix-It-First" programme to put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent repairs, like the nearly 70, 000 structurally deficient bridges across the country.
Federal Highway Administration data from 2006 shows that 24.5 percent of the nation's bridges longer than 20 feet were categorized as "structurally deficient" or "functionally obsolete" (data from Utah and New Mexico was from 2005).
But, he noted, out of 13, 000 state and local bridges in Minnesota that are 20 feet and more in span, 1, 160 of them -- 8 percent of the state's bridges -- are considered structurally deficient.
Public officials have focused in recent years on the desperate need for money to repair thousands of bridges deemed structurally deficient, which typically means a major portion of the bridge is in poor condition or worse.
The bridge was not classified as structurally deficient, but a Federal Highway Administration database lists it as being "functionally obsolete" a category meaning that the design is outdated, such as having narrow shoulders and low clearance underneath.
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