Here in Chicago, potholes are a perennial problem, and it can take a long time for some of them to get repaired. So much so, in fact, that a friend of mine, who’s an artist who makes tile mosaics, does a “guerrilla pothole repair” program every year, in which he finds persistent potholes, and fills them in himself, including adding his mosaics. 
That’s 9%, and on the positive side, this is way down from past years. The number of structurally deficient (i.e., requiring elevated maintenance) bridges was around 72,000 in 2007, and as high as 150,000 back in 1984.
I’d be curious to hear how the 9% figure compares to other countries, but I cannot seem to find any data on the number of structurally deficient bridges except in the US.
What does "structurally deficient bridges " mean?
Are they safe?
Parts of Puerto Rico are still without power 7 months after a hurricane hit. (they are a US territory)
I’m a bit of a public transport nerd so please forgive me for linking to a $25 billion project in London that comes to fruition later this year - it’s like a new tube line except it’s railway scale inc. 12-cariage trains, and crosses east to west underground. It adds maybe 8-10% in one hit to tube capacity, and I love it! Crossrail:
It’s difficult to make a comparison, to be honest. Most countries I’ve been to outside of the US are comparatively tiny. The big ones I’ve been too are similar stories…depends on where you are looking. Russia and China have VERY mixed infrastructure, for instance, running the gamut between good/adequate to unbelievably horrible to the point I was genuinely frightened in some cases. The US is a mixed bag, depending on which state you are in and where in that state you are at. Generally I’ve found countries like Japan to have a lot better road and rail infrastructure overall, and the same goes for many western European nations, though I’ve seen some bad spots in France, Spain and Italy (though, full disclosure, this was over a decade ago, so perhaps it’s a lot better now).
This is indicative of folks from other countries and this subject, however and to me demonstrates the disconnect. I’ve never seen a 9 day outage (I recall a pretty vicious ice storm I lived through on the east coast where power was out about a week once), and I’ve lived all over the country. The only time I’ve heard of something like this is during a major storm like a hurricane and generally even then in only difficult to reach or very poor areas/states. But the US is a continent sized nation with some very extreme weather and as noted a mixed bag of both infrastructure and politics. Some states really take infrastructure more seriously from a funding and use perspective than others. I notice this most when I drive between, say, Arizona and New Mexico. You can actually see the difference when you cross the border, even though the terrain is very similar.
The thing is, when you are talking about ‘the US’ it’s difficult to convey, especially to someone who hasn’t been here or who has been to a few cities, how vast the distances are…and the differences. And how silly it is to try and lump them together to compare and contrast between us and smaller, more compact nations. To give this some perspective, Texas (which, admittedly is one of the larger states) is about 10% larger than France…and about double the size of Japan and Germany.
In the cite I posted earlier, the term is defined as this:
Given that range, some are undoubtedly safer than others. Bridges that are getting scores of 0 or 1 are, I’d imagine, in pretty terrible shape, and, hopefully, are slated for repair or replacement in the very near future.
I believe that even though Puerto Rico is a US territory they divide up the (relatively small) percentage of Federal funding for roads and infrastructure with the other territories. There are all sorts of funding snaffles linked to Puerto Rico that gum up the system, so I don’t think pointing this out is an indication that the states are in a similar, well, state of cluster-fuckery. Not saying what has happened in Puerto Rico is right or isn’t a major issue, but the US has never really figured out how to manage disasters in the territories, and Puerto Rico’s own internal funding and politics are pretty screwed up as well, since they have been on the verge of default for years now.
It’s a perfect storm of bad and doesn’t seem likely to get better any time soon. Probably not until the US figures out what should really be done with the territory…and the people of Puerto Rico figure out once and for all which way they want to jump.
I guess maybe the only “good” thing is that PR is a warm area and the people did not have to live through a winter with no power.
In my limited experience in Europe I was positively surprised by the efficiency and ubiquity of their public transportation. It made me realize how lacking the US was even beyond what I already knew.
On the other hand, it made me appreciate the sidewalks and shoulders in America: I still think they are sorely lacking in places but they are great in comparison to similar-density areas in England. Sure, Europe is more walkable because of their ubiquitous public transportation and comparatively-compact towns, but country roads in America tend to have walkable shoulders and barring that, ditches far enough away you can walk between the road and the ditch, and cities tend to have large enough sidewalks that if there are multiple people in them it doesn’t feel crowded.
ETA: my only experience in continental europe of sidewalks is the Paseo del Prado and it had indeed a very spacious sidewalk, but its history and even its name lead me to wonder if it isn’t the exception that proves the rule, i.e. they’re saying “THIS place has good sidewalks unlike those other places!”
For comparison’s sake, do you know what the terminology used in the UK for bridge status is? It must be different, because I am not finding anything on UK (or OECD) bridge status using US terminology.
Bottom line summation: The US is big. Really big. To put it in some sort of perspective, if California were Portugal, Maine would be almost to the Caspian Sea and we don’t even need to bring Alaska into this. What that means is that infrastructure in the US varies dramatically across the country. Generally speaking, Insterstate Highways are in good shape, Federal Highways and State roads are usually pretty good. County and municipal roads can be haphazard. As for the electrical grid. It’s not perfect, but it’s not a crumbling world of disarray and power outages. Most UPS’s are more for a building outage where five people are plugging heaters in to the same circuit rather than some sort of grid issue. Most widescale power outages are the result of natural disasters, not the grid failing. You might get the occasional local outage where a car hits a transformer pole and knocks out power for a few dozen houses, but it’s not like we live in the land of rolling blackouts. I grew up in the middle of nowhere where we got 160 inches of snow a year and even after three foot blizzards, we rarely lost power and only once or twice for more than a day in 20 years of living there and one of those times was a 1000 year flood that destroyed pretty much everything. Public transport is definitely an issue once you leave the metro areas, but I’m not sure how much can be done. If you live 40 miles from the nearest town with more than 1000 people in it, you can’t really expect train service every 15 minutes.
While surely there’s some relationship between the size of the country and power outages, let’s not have anyone draw the conclusion that people in major cities aren’t impacted as well.
Here in the DC region, with a population of about 6 million, there are severe storms every now and then that will leave thousands to maybe even tens of thousands of houses without power for multiple days. I’m not quite sure how to quantify how frequently this happens, but here are some descriptions of recent events here in the metropolitan area:
I would guess that in the last 10 years or so, I’ve had two major multiday power outages. I think one probably lasted about 3 days, maybe 4 (that was the 2010 one linked above).
Power outage due to natural disasters are still infrastructure failures. It’s a symptom of a power grid that isn’t designed to withstand weather events, and doesn’t have the redundancy to cope with failure. And if a car crash knocks out power for a neighborhood, it’s because they didn’t spend the money to bury the power lines, as is done in most of Europe.
Though of course Japan isn’t perfect either. The whole of Tokyo had recurring rolling blackouts for months after the Tohoku earthquake destroyed or disabled many power stations at the same time. But at least it took the most powerful earthquake in the history of Japan to disable the power grid to that extent.
I kind of agree with you since they are technically infrastructure problems, but there’s a scale involved. If a tree topples on my house and knocks out the electricity, yes, that’s technically an infrastructure issue, but I’m not sure it’s a major problem. There’s a cost-benefit analysis that has to be performed. For a fully redundant grid to every house to be built you’re talking significant costs. Power rates in the US are typically about half of what you see in Europe and some places in the US are 1/4 that of say Germany. Of course, one could make the argument that Americans are energy hogs and higher electrical costs would be a good thing, but that’s a different topic. For my usage last month, I would be paying between 200 to 400 euros for electricity if I were in Europe and most Americans would rather put up with the occasional hour long outage than deal with those rates.
Burying power lines is a somewhat controversial idea here. My particular state has difficulty with it due to frequent flooding and most lines running through floodplains. The loss of lines through flooding is judged to be higher than the loss of lines through snow or wind. The US is generally more disaster prone than Europe and so having lines that can be replaced quickly and cheaply takes precedence over lines that are less susceptible to damage. The logic is that a hurricane is going to take out lines regardless, is it better to dig them to replace them or restring them? Of course, some places in the US are less susceptible to disaster and some of those places do bury their lines.
In our defense, I don’t think the US has ever had 100,000 people lose power because of schoolchildren burning their textbooks, or 25,000 traffic lights go out because of a buildup of three feet of pigeon guano. We did once have a county’s 911 system disabled by a turkey, however.
When I was in college at the University of Wisconsn-Madison in the 1980s, most of the campus (home to 45,000 students) lost power for several hours one afternoon, when a very unlucky squirrel who was exploring the campus’s electrical substation touched two surfaces at once, causing a short that took out several transformers.
Exactly so. As I noted earlier, here in the Chicago area (which is definitely not rural), power outages lasting a day or more due to weather aren’t uncommon at all. I’ll also note that the “weather” doesn’t have to be hundred-year storms, either; just a line of severe thunderstorms with some impressive straight-line winds, or an overnight ice storm, can be enough to take out power to hundreds of thousands of people for extended periods of time.
I’m in the more populated area of the Netherlands. In my mid thirties. In don’t think I’ve experienced a single minute of power outage in my life.
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Heck, there are two suburbs of Cleveland (both fairly affluent) that I sometimes pass through, and when it’s rainy, you can see the border between them, too. For whatever reason, the storm drainage system is just much better in Rocky River than in Westlake.
And I’ve lived about 2/3 of my life in major metro areas, and 1/3 in a small town, all of it in areas that get severe weather, and the longest power outage I’ve ever been in was about six hours.