Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have all complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a one-time cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed. There is still no consensus on how to solve the problem or where to get the massive amounts of money needed to fix it, just another example of political paralysis in Washington.
Every day in Pittsburgh five million people travel across bridges that either need to be replaced or undergo major repairs.
Three hundred bridges become structurally deficient each year in the state of Pennsylvania. That's one percent added to the already 23 percent they already have. They just can't fix them fast enough.
People make first judgments about people based on their appearance. There's an old saying, "The clothes make the man.".
Stretch of I-95 has already had one brush with disaster. In 2008 two contractors from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation stopped to get a sausage sandwich, and parked their cars under this bridge. And fortunately they wanted that sausage sandwich because they saw one of these piers with an eight foot gash in it about five inches wide. And oh, they knew automatically that this bridge was in deep trouble.
Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in country when it comes to the condition of its infrastructure, and Philadelphia isn't any better off than Pittsburgh. Nine million people a day travel over 900 bridges classified as structurally deficient, some of them on a heavily traveled section of I-95.
There is now a fairly crowded field out there of people who are incredibly wealthy that are giving money to advance their own political agendas.
