Tired of bumping along I-80 in Northern California? Trump, Congress say they want to help
Traveling on Interstate 80 through Sacramento? Chances are you’ll bump over three of the area’s “structurally deficient” bridges.
The county’s worst rated and heavily traveled bridges in 2018 were on I-80. Among them: The bridge over Winters Street in Del Paso Heights, an eastbound bridge over railroad tracks in Del Paso and another over Rio Linda Boulevard.
The bridges are part of a local inventory compiled last year by the nonpartisan American Road & Transportation Builders Association, and also include three spots on Highway 50 eastbound and westbound over 26th Street and westbound over 10th Street.
The designation does not mean it’s unsafe to cross a bridge, a Caltrans spokesman said, but it signals that repairs should be made some time soon. Caltrans has authority to shut a bridge if it requires immediate repairs.
“All bridges and tunnels in California that are open to traffic are safe for travel.” said Dennis Keaton, Caltrans public information officer.
Besides federal funding, Caltrans pays for roadwork through the state general fund and new taxes and fees adopted in the 2017 Road Repair and Accountability Act. That law provides an additional $5 billion each year in state funding to maintain, fix and repair damaged roads and bridges.
Keaton said Caltrans plans to provide the Federal Highway Administration with an updated description of work that has been done on bridges listed as poor by mid-March 2020.
Trump’s infrastructure plan
President Donald Trump and Congress say they want to help.
“We must also rebuild America’s infrastructure,” Trump said in his State of the Union address last week. The president will unveil his new budget, including plans for transportation spending, Monday.
House Democrats and Republicans last week unveiled new plans to pump billions of federal dollars into highway and bridge repair around the country. A Senate committee last year unanimously passed a highway and bridge improvement plan, and Trump Tuesday urged its adoption.
Despite the bitter partisanship that routinely paralyzes Washington, road and bridge improvement is that rare area where the two parties keep talking and often coming together.
After all, “People and goods are now literally stuck trying to move on transportation networks first developed nearly 70 years ago,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Drivers in Sacramento, and for that matter the state of California, understand.
Of the 25,737 bridges in the state, 7% or 1,812 were classified as structurally deficient in 2018, according to a report from the road builders and data from the Federal Highway Administration National Bridge Inventory. The most heavily traveled are in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
California’s percentage ranks as the 28th worst for crumbling bridges. .California has found 5,093 bridges require repair, and fixing them would cost an estimated $8.8 billion.
“The bridges are not inherently unsafe,” said Alison Black, the road builders’ group chief economist. But drivers and pedestrians may see incremental problems — falling chunks of concrete or big cracks.
Northern California bridges
The report found that in California’s 6th congressional district, which generally is Sacramento, 44 of the 1,009 bridges or 4.4%, were structurally deficient.
In the 7th District, or Sacramento’s suburbs of Elk Grove and Folsom, 27 or 3.7% of the 735 bridges got that designation.
The 4th District, which stretches along the Sierra Nevada from Lake Tahoe to Kings Canyon National Park, has 2,231 bridges and 218, or 9.8%, are deficient.
In the 3rd District, which includes Davis and Fairfield, of 2,229 bridges in the area, 150, or 6.7%, were deficient. Most traveled was Interstate 80 over Dan Wilson Creek in Solano County.
There’s long been agreement in Washington that thousands of bridges urgently need fixing. The 2018 data found that nationwide, 47,052 bridges, or 7.6%, were structurally deficient.
The centerpiece of the House Democratic plan is a $329 billion five-year outline that would not only repair roads and bridges, but take steps to reduce pedestrian and bicyclist deaths and dramatically increase the availability of vehicle charging stations.
The plan has no details of precisely what bridges could be fixed or when. Committees plan hearings in the weeks ahead.
Republicans are also vague about specifics. Their tone is similar to that of Democrats — “fixing and improving the nation’s core system of highways and bridges” is crucial, said the GOP plan.
Republicans are somewhat more precise in pledging to remember the needs of rural communities, and stress that the current system that’s supposed to find highway projects, fuel taxes, “is not a long-term solution.”
The current federal tax of 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents a gallon for diesel fuel has not gone up since 1993. Most federal government spending on roads and mass transit comes from the federal highway trust fund.
The Senate is a step ahead of all this. Last year, its Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously approved a 27% increase in highway and bridge spending.
To expedite the projects, it would streamline the federal regulatory process, which includes a review of the environmental impact. Trump last week urged passage of the Senate plan.
The disagreements over these provisions are polite, and all the key players maintain that they can swiftly find common ground. After all, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, “Everybody is affected by this.”
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