While many states have long struggled with infrastructure upkeep, a new study from the Reason Foundation shows just how bad highway conditions are getting in the United States, from deficient bridges to spiraling urban traffic congestion.
The 24th Annual Highway Report ranked state highway systems in 13 categories, using state-submitted highway data from 2016 supplemented by traffic congestion and bridge data from 2017. The categories include total disbursements per mile, capital and bridge disbursements per mile, maintenance disbursements per mile, and admin disbursements per mile. Categories also include urban and rural interstate pavement condition, rural and urban arterial pavement conditions, urbanized area congestion, structurally deficient bridges, overall fatality rate, and rural and urban fatality rates.
“In looking at the nation’s highway system as a whole, there was a decades-long trend of incremental improvement in most key categories, but the overall condition of the highway system has worsened in recent years,” said Baruch Feigenbaum, lead author of the Annual Highway Report and assistant director of transportation at Reason Foundation. “This year we see some improvement on structurally deficient bridges, but pavement conditions on rural and urban highways are declining, the rise in traffic fatalities is worrying, and we aren’t making needed progress on traffic congestion in our major cities.”
The troubling news that the report found was that pavement conditions on both urban and rural interstates are deteriorating, along with rural arterial principal roads. The percentage of the latter in poor condition are at their worst levels since 2000, and in terms of the study’s three fatality categories, fatalities in 2016 were at their highest since 2007.
Better information found in the report is that 39 states’ bridges have seen lowered percentages in structural deficiency, though 18 percent or more of bridges remain structurally deficient in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and West Virginia.
Overall, North Dakota, Virginia, and Missouri host the best performing and most cost-efficient highway systems in the country, while New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Hawaii have the worst. Virginia’s ranking was a staggering leap from the last Annual Highway Report — it jumped 25 spots. New Jersey’s bottom ranking is especially concerning, however, as it also spends more money per mile than any other state and still has the worst urban traffic congestion and one of the worst urban interstate pavement conditions in the country.
In terms of fatalities, however, Massachusetts is the safest with an overall fatality rate of 1, while South Carolina is the deadliest with an overall fatality rate of 50.