This tragedy shows the importance of inspection and cost of maintenance of infrastructure. In the U.S. there are approximately 600,000 highway bridges. It's estimated that a quarter of them are at their end-of-life mark (that avg being estimated by some at 70). Not counting over 1,700 bridges still in use built before the 19th century, the breakdown is something like this:
This is just bridges. There are also about 84,000 dams and in a decade or two a huge number of both of these will approach their end of life, just as a legion of civil engineers go into retirement.
> This tragedy shows the importance of inspection and cost of maintenance of infrastructure.
Your table is scary - and it leads me to one question: why is the future maintenance not budgeted in with any public infrastructure project? For example, a city wants a shiny new bridge... but without provable funding for the maintenance in the future (e.g. tax projections), it is not allowed to be built.
Of course stuff like economic shifts (leading to a loss of tax base) can't be prevented but it's a small risk compared to some politician deciding "I need something monumental where I can cut the opening ribbons" and loading the future generations with maintenance debt.
You would need every local, state, and federal entity to move to GAAP or IFRS instead of cash basis accounting at the same time. Otherwise some localities would purposefully not do so to claim that they're a tax haven good for attracting jobs. And such a move would probably require a massive correction in taxes or service levels or pensions to get back into shape, which would be a hard lift even for the most authoritarian of governments.
This is, in fact, how greenfield suburbs operate; they claim much lower tax rates because they don't really care about the infrastructure lifecycle, whereas cities are constantly maintaining and fixing things. Some of the first suburbs in America in Nassau County have such poor financial positions that county finances have been controlled by the state since 2000, and property taxes have hiked every year, with increases of up to 20% in a single year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassau_Interim_Finance_Authori...
> but without provable funding for the maintenance in the future (e.g. tax projections), it is not allowed to be built.
Because proving viable funding does nothing to guarantee that those funds will be put towards maintenance, repair, and replacement. The next round of legislators in 10 years may very well decide to put that money elsewhere.
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