Should Infrastructure be Politically Controlled?

Originally Posted by Bradylama

The problem isn't unique to Minnesota. If you compare the percentage of bridge deficiencies with taxes raised, you'll find that some of the highest-taxed states also have some of the worst problems with bridge maintenance. Rhode Island is in the top ten when it comes to taxes collected, and has a higher percentage of deficient bridges than any other state. Pennsylvania has taxes higher than 31 other states, and a bridge deficiency rate that is the second worst in the country. New York is number ten in taxes collected, and is one of the worst when it comes maintenance. In fact, half of the top ten-taxed states are in the bottom ten when to comes to bridge maintenance.

So the states with the most bridges have the most problems with bridges? HOLY SHIT ALERT THE MEDIA. Pittsburgh has more bridges than Venice and it's had a shrinking population for the past 60 years.

Also, which taxes are they talking about? State taxes in Pennsylvania are actually pretty low, sales tax is 6% for most of the state (except for food and clothing where it's 0%), and property taxes and such vary greatly between counties and municipalities.

Also, having been a frequent traveler on toll roads I have to say that it really doesn't make them any better to drive on than typical state roads. I just drove on I-80, a free road, and it was in better condition than the PA Turnpike which I pay around $16 each way to drive across most of the state.

Finally, Brady, it's not like this is something new where a city is giving money to a sports team to stay in their city. It's a pretty established practice that many teams do when they either feel attendance is dropping or their facilities are lacking. After all, they're using their ability to move to a different city as a bargaining chip. What's so terrible about that?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by a lurker

Do you believe drunk driving presents an elevated risk?

As a note, I was reading a USA Today the other week and there was a letter sent in by some civil engineering PhD at a university that talked about how the safety of bridges are rated. Apparently there's a whole slew of actual safety factors, then it's modified by the cost of repair, cost of detours, difficulty of detours, loss to business during detours, how critical the piece of infrastructure is, and how reliable the report actually is.

Also, a few years ago they had done a study on how well bridge inspectors could find various defects in bridges. Apparently even the experienced ones could only do around 5% detection of propagating cracks through the concrete. What they said was really needed was new methods of trying to detect faults and newer field tests methods that would find cracks that were typically missed by inspectors.

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