A huge pothole: transportation budgets are out of alignment and the repair bill is through the roof.

• Author: Stiny, Andrew

The new Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis opened last September with squad cars, fire trucks and ambulances leading a parade of motorists who wanted to be the first to drive on the span replacing the structure that collapsed in August 2007 and left 13 dead.

Drivers honked and waved American flags on that late summer morning. It was a moment of celebration, obscuring the fact that the infrastructure crisis the bridge collapse brought into focus is largely unchanged.

Despite vows at the federal and state level to confront the nation's crumbling bridges and highways, problems over how to finance billions in repairs persist. The federal economic recovery package--it was being debated in Congress when State Legislatures went to press--offers tens of billions for ready-to-go infrastructure projects. It does not, however, address the long-term funding problem.

There are broader infrastructure problems of concern--water systems, schools, airports and more--but the deterioration of roads and bridges is a pressing problem across the country. Fixing them is a huge challenge, transportation experts say.

"Our infrastructure is in desperate need of investment," says Pete Rahn, past president of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. "We have seen 30 years of underinvestment."

The huge scope of problems facing the National Highway System--encompassing 160,000 miles of interstate highways, arterial and other roads--was outlined in a 2007 report to Congress from the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission.

The report cautioned, among other things, that many highways, transit lines and railroads are buckling under loads of traffic never foreseen by the engineers who designed them. It also noted that congestion, once limited to large coastal cities, now is a problem across the nation. And with a population expected to swell to 420 million by 2050, these problems will just get worse.

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It is difficult to nail down an exact figure, but experts think it would cost more than $250 billion annually from all sources to make the most urgent bridge and road repairs and upgrades.

BRIDGES

There are about 600,000 bridges in the United States. The Highway Bridge Program is the main source of money to maintain and replace them. It provided more than $4 billion to states in fiscal year 2007, yet $140 billion is needed immediately to repair and modernize all the nation's bridges, according to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

The Government Accountability Office reports that as of 2007, 72,519 bridges nationwide were "structurally deficient" and another 79,798 were "functionally obsolete," says Kate Siggerud, managing director of physical infrastructure issues for GAO and head of the team that issued the report.

A "structurally deficient" bridge, such as the Minneapolis bridge, has a poor superstructure. A "functionally obsolete" bridge might be in good shape but inadequate for traffic needs because its design is out of date.

But there is good news. The number of...