Small Municipalities Own Thousands of Bridges but Have Zero Engineering Staff

Of the 617,000 bridges in the United States, approximately 56% are owned by local governments: counties, cities, towns, and townships. Many of these jurisdictions, particularly in rural areas, have no licensed engineer on staff. A township of 2,000 people may own a dozen bridges and have a road crew of three people with no engineering training. They are responsible for maintaining structures that, if they fail, could kill people. This matters because bridge management requires engineering judgment that these jurisdictions simply do not have. Deciding whether a crack is structural or cosmetic, whether a scour hole is progressing, whether a bridge can safely carry a school bus: these are engineering questions with life-safety implications. Without an engineer, these decisions are made by elected officials or road foremen based on gut instinct, or they are not made at all. The downstream pain is that small municipalities cannot effectively participate in federal bridge programs. Applying for federal bridge replacement funding requires engineering studies, environmental reviews, and right-of-way documentation that cost $100,000 to $500,000 before a single shovel hits the ground. A small town cannot front that money, and even if it could, it would not know how to manage the process. The result is that the jurisdictions with the worst bridges are the least able to access the funding to fix them. This problem persists because there is no mechanism to aggregate small bridge owners into units large enough to support professional engineering staff. Some states have created bridge programs that provide engineering support to local governments, but these are underfunded and oversubscribed. The alternative, transferring bridge ownership to states or counties, is politically difficult because it requires the receiving entity to accept both the bridge and the liability. The structural root cause is the American system of hyper-local government. The US has over 89,000 local governments, many of which were created in the 19th century when bridges were simple wooden structures that any carpenter could maintain. The governmental structure has not adapted to the reality that modern bridges are engineered structures requiring professional management. Nobody deliberately decided that a township of 500 people should be responsible for maintaining a 200-foot concrete bridge; it happened incrementally as the bridge was upgraded from a wooden structure to a concrete one while the governmental structure remained unchanged.