By Dan Norton

– How unyielding is that bridge you drive across every day?

We teamed up with our friends at Esri to produce a map of every structurally deficient bridge in the Greater Philadelphia region. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation defines a “structurally deficient” bridge as having deterioration to one or more of its major components.

Twenty-three percent of Pennsylvania’s 22,660 bridges are structurally deficient, which is the highest in the nation. The Transportation Funding Bill Act 89, passed in late 2013, will provide the dollars needed to heal this component of the state’s ailing infrastructure, but it won’t be fully funded until 2019.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave Pennsylvania bridges a D-plus on its 2014 infrastructure report card. (At least bridges got a better grade than Pennsylvania’s D-minus in wastewater management systems, which “discharge billions of gallons of untreated sewage into Pennsylvania’s surface waters each year.”)

Just because a bridge is classified as structurally deficient doesn’t make it too dangerous to cross. Bridges are required by law to be inspected at least once every two years. If a bridge is deemed unsafe, it can be saddled with weight and speed limits or even closed down for repairs.

Go to: http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/datacenter/plotting-greater-philadelphias-structurally.html to click around the map to see if any of your local bridges are on it, or feel free to search the map by ZIP code.

Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/datacenter/plotting-greater-philadelphias-structurally.html