The State of Our Roads and Bridges

“A modern, efficient highway system is essential to meet the needs of our growing population, our expanding economy, and our national security.”

President Eisenhower
1955 State of the Union Address

While the most important economic impact of smart infrastructure investment comes from long - term competitiveness, productivity, innovation, lower prices, and higher incomes, infrastructure investment also creates many thousands of jobs in the near - term that are directly linked to the American economy and difficult to ship overseas. These jobs span across a wide variety of different industries. For example, road building not only requires construction workers, but also grading and paving equipment, gasoline or diesel to run the machines, smaller hand tools of all sorts, raw inputs of cement, gravel, and asphalt, surveyors to map the site, engineers and site managers, and even accountants to keep track of costs.

Today there are more than 4 million miles of road, 600,000 bridges, and 3,000 transit providers in the U.S. And yet, over the past 20 years, total federal, state, and local investment in transportation has fallen as a share of GDP – while population, congestion, and maintenance backlogs have increased.

65 percent of America’s major roads are rated in less than good condition, one in four bridges require significant repair or cannot handle today’s traffic, and forty five percent of Americans lack access to transit.