Will we ever fix our crumbling infrastructure – and how long will it take?

Hours before President Biden visited Pittsburgh to tout his bipartisan infrastructure law Friday, one of the city’s bridges collapsed over a ravine and injured ten people. The fall of Fern Hollow Bridge again made clear just how desperately Pennsylvania’s infrastructure needs repair. The Commonwealth has some of the oldest bridges in the country: over 3,200 are rated in poor condition. This hour, we’ll look at crumbling infrastructure in the Keystone State and around the nation, discuss where infrastructure spending should go and how long it will take to mend and upgrade our bridges and roads.

Guests:

Margaret Krauss, Development & Transportation reporter for WESA (@MargaretKrauss)

Larry Shifflet, Deputy Secretary for Planning at PennDOT (@PennDOTNews)

Adie Tomer, Director of the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative at the Brookings Institution (@AdieTomer)

Recommended Reads:

90.5WESA: What Pittsburgh’s Fern Hollow Bridge collapse can tell us about Pennsylvania bridges “While the state has reduced the number of bridges that are structurally deficient, much of the funding that could have been used to address aging roads and bridges instead has been used to fund the State Police for much of the past decade.”

Politico: Infrastructure bonanza might not head off future bridge collapses “Biden…used Friday’s collapse to highlight the need to fund repairs. The fact that nobody was killed or seriously injured gave Democrats the freedom to talk policy while the scene was still being cleared.”