NOTE: This post is probably wrong. What I'd really like is the number of bridge failures compared to the total number of road bridges, but it's not clear that either of those numbers is available in a reliable way across countries. I suspect that my overall conclusion is still correct (namely that the US is sort of middling when it comes to bridge infrastructure) but it's hard to say for sure.
I'll keep looking for something better, but for now I'm crying uncle. I just don't know if the data is available to really say anything about this.
After four years of waiting, it's finally Infrastructure Week. And that got me curious: The poster child of lousy US infrastructure is our seemingly endless series of bridge failures. But how do we compare with other countries? You can probably guess where this led me.
It turns out that Wikipedia has both a list of bridge failures by country and a list of each country's road network size. Isn't that great? The internet is truly a blessed thing.
Ideally, I'd like to know the number of bridges per country, but road network size is a pretty good proxy. So I counted up bridge failures over the past two decades and then calculated the number of failures per million kilometers of road network. I promise that I had no idea how this would turn out before I did it. Here's the result:
This list includes the top 20 countries by road network size. The US is kind of middling, clocking in at 4.1 failures per million kilometers, nearly identical to the EU as a whole.
This is just a back-of-the-envelope sort of calculation, but I think it still provides a good sense of where everyone stands. Obviously the US is rich enough to do better, but we're hardly some kind of huge outlier in the bridge failure department.
UPDATE: I've updated the chart so that it shows the top 20 countries by size of road network. This eliminates the selection bias in the original chart, which included all countries with more than two bridge failures.
I don't think the "bridge failures by country" list is at all representative. Most bridges that fail are fairly small, and don't make a lot news.
One example: In the late 1990s (I don't remember offhand the exact year), my wife and I happened upon a collapsed steel trestle bridge across a river near the border of Oaxaca and Veracruz in Mexico. This was on Highway 175, the main thoroughfare between the two states (although still only a two-lane road).
The collapse had occurred shortly before we arrived, and the taxis on either side were doing a brisk business ferrying people who had waded across the river (this was towards the end of the dry season and the water was fairly low). There was also a pickup truck that had tried to ford the river and was stuck on a gravel bar. My wife wanted to take a photo of the collapsed bridge, but the soldiers who were on the scene made it very clear that no photos were going to be taken that day.
Anyway, the loss of this bridge (for who knows how long, given that this was Mexico) along one of only two roads connecting Oaxaca City and southern Veracruz must have dealt a significant blow to commerce in the region, but you won't find any mention of it on any lists.
Another kind of example: Also in the 1990s, my wife and I participated in the Oklahoma Breeding Bird Atlas. A part of that involved walking underneath small rural bridges, many of them barely more than culverts, looking for signs of Eastern Phoebe or Barn Swallow nests. In many cases, after having seen the condition of the bridges from below, I was somewhat reluctant to drive across them.
Yeah, Seems pretty anecdotal.
Looking at the UK bridge failures , most of them are footbridges in Cumbria which were damaged by floods in 2009.
Another one was a road bridge which was undergoing routine maintenance when floods hit and caused damage as the maintenance works allowed the floodwater to get into the pillars.
Huh. Chile is a middle-income country with some probably rickety infrastructure in a lot of places. But Denmark and Norway? Both countries have a lot of coastline (and mountains, in Norway's case) connected by bridges so that's no surprise, but if you see what gas and automobile taxes in those countries are like, I am a little surprised that the bridges appear not to be maintained very well, relative to a lot of other countries, anyway. What am I missing?
If you look at the details on Wikipedia, it is 3 bridges in Denmark and 2 in Norway. The bridges failed while under construction for 3 of the cases, one was hit by a ship, and one was hit by a landslide.
Yeah, the top ones smell like major outliers to me- Denmark is tiny and heavily coastal, so you are probably really underestimating the number of bridges with the road network size.
I would guess a similar effect for Norway or Chile- roads are heavily concentrated on the coast and population isn't dense throughout most of the country so they have unusually sparse road networks that necessarily will have a lot of bridges.
Outliers. Small countries, few road "miles". A couple of bridge failures, from accidents or whatever, skyrocket the percentages.
Norwegian bridges cannot withstand all the black metal music.
according to national bridge inventory data, about one in every 11 or 12 bridges in this country has some sort of structural deficiency. the question isn't just how many failures have happened but how many are waiting to happen. and if there's a structurally deficient bridge i travel across regularly, i really don't care how we compare statistically with germany or the eu or anyone else for that matter.
“Some others are worse” is an argument most of us learn to stop using in grade school.
Normalizing the data helps for inter-comparisons. However, some of the numbers are small, e.g. only 3 bridge collapses each are listed for Chili and Denmark in the past 20 years, 26 for the US. (Yes, my counting might be off, but you get the idea).
and one not on the list:
https://www.enr.com/articles/46768-us-firm-helps-chile-save-a-beleaguered-bascule-span
I'm confused by this post. Because the salient point is not how we compare with other countries in this regard. it's how much of our transportation infrastructure -- bridges, roads, whatever -- is in serious disrepair. So confess I don't know what one has to do with another. Unless Kevin is saying we don't need seek treatment pronto for our stage II lymphoma on the strength that everybody else has stage IV.
Problem with using these statistics as proxies for state of infrastructure is they do not take into account the reason behind the collapse. A closer look reveals some major differences. Compare Canada and the U.S.
Based on the above calculations Canada is slightly worse than U.S. However, at the wikipedia site I count 8 "bridge collapses" in Canada over the last 20 years. 3 were rail bridges, 2 collapsed during construction, 1 collapse was caused by the construction of its replacement, and 1 collapsed 42 days after it opened. Leaving 1 failure of an old bridge.
I count 25 for the U.S.1 was a pedestrian bridge, 2 had issues during construction, 1 collapsed during demolition and 1 may have been arson. The remaining ones were brought down by being hit by something (8, ), fire caused by an accident on the bridge(3), collapse due to flooding (4), collapsed due to oversize load (2), and just collapsed (3).
While some of these may be arguable, there is no doubt that looking solely at old bridges that collapsed, the U.S. is far worse than Kevin's numbers indicate
One of the stories about a bridge collapsing after being hit by something (an overheight load) taught me a new phrase: "fracture critical". This is engineers' lingo that apparently means, in simple English "break it in one place and the whole thing falls down". Arguably, a bridge that is fracture critical is defective, and needs to be replaced or reinforced to give it some damage tolerance.
I suspect there are economic limits to safety against fracture critical events. You can't plan for freak accidents even though once in a while they do happen.
Bridges damaged or destroyed when hit by, e.g. barges, may still be an infrastructure issue — channels are infrastructure, as are buoys, lights and other navigational aids, warning lights on or around the bridge ...
It seems Kevin's contrarianism must come out, the consequences be damned. What is the point of this useless comparison of countries unless it's to help Republicans with talking points against an infrastructure bill?
Between 2001 and July 2020, there were 26 identified failures in the U.S. in the data source he used -- more than one per year. Some were the result of vehicle collisions with supports -- does that indicate there is a fixable flaw? -- but most were major and many involved Interstates. How about trusting engineers who identify problems? Infrastructure spending as a percentage of GDP has declined in recent decades. That's millions of jobs never created.
In the Before Times when we used to travel, I visited parts of the US, Japan, South Korea, and a fair bit of Europe.
Northern European public infrastructure is, on average, in far better condition than the US. No ifs, ands, or buts. So is Japan and Korea's.
Now, if you want to make the argument that those countries over-invest in infrastructure (there's a case for that in Japan; they have beautiful rural roads to service declining populations), sure. But I'd find an argument that the US's infrastructure is better than Denmark's pretty hard to believe.
The Wikipedia list is so incomplete it's useless as data for any kind of analysis. For example the latest 'bridge failure' listed for Australia happened more than 12 years ago. There have been plenty since then. Indeed the state of the timber bridges in some council districts is a major problem. The repairs or replacement needed to make them safe is beyond the resources of the councils concerned.
The Wikipedia list would more accurately be labelled 'bridge accidents'. Almost every item concerns a structural break of some sort, and casualties have their own column. Most bridge deficiencies are discovered by regular inspections, carried out for that exact purpose, before the bridge actually breaks. The bridge in question is then closed or its use limited until it can be repaired. Few of those events would get reported in the media.