Pittsburgh Bridge Collapse Underscores Urgent Need For Fix-It-First Policy

The collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh is just a preview of potential disasters to come under the new infrastructure legislation, which continues to allow states to prioritize building new capacity for drivers over fixing the dangerously broken infrastructure they’ve already got, advocates said.

Ten people were injured early Friday morning in the collapse of the 52-year-old Frick Park Bridge, which had been listed in “poor” condition by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation since 2011. It would only have cost $1.5 million to reinforce, but transportation authorities didn’t initiate the fix — nor have they completed work on the estimated 175 other bridges in surrounding Allegheny County that are also graded as “poor.”

Yet in October 2021, a new $900-million, 13-mile beltway opened on Pittsburgh’s suburban fringe, despite the fact that the metro area population has declined for seven years straight. Between 2009 and 2014, Pennsylvania spent just 22 percent of its capital expenditures on road repair and 29 percent on road expansion, with the remainder devoted to other capital projects.

With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act enshrined into law for the next five years,  advocates will now need to pressure their state transportation leaders to spend their federal funds on repair rather than expansion — and not let them pass the buck when they claim they can’t help with local maintenance priorities. DeGood points out that under the policy known as “uniform transferability,” state and local agencies can legally redistribute federal funds to one another, which means the Pennsylvania DOT could have helped the Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure to fix the Frick Park bridge if the agency considered it a higher priority than, say, yet another boondoggle airport beltway.

“Don’t let anybody tell you, ‘Oh, this is a city bridge, it’s not our problem,'” he added. “States always claim poverty, and they also claim that somehow, there’s strictures that prevent them from doing repairs. That’s not the case. These are political decisions that have been made by generations of transportation officials.”

When it comes to the incoming flood of federal highway money, DeGood says Pennsylvania could spend the estimated $11.3 billion it will receive from Washington on completing its repair backlog. But unless advocates speak out, the state probably won’t.

“Unfortunately, history strongly suggests that states will not prioritize repair,” he said. “This [bridge collapse] is not a thunderbolt that came out of the blue sky. This is the result of a system that lacks accountability…We can look out across time and see when better policies around repair would have prevented catastrophe. This is one of those times.”