Dive Brief:
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Decades in the making, the St. Croix bridge connecting Minnesota and Wisconsin is slated to open next week, according to the Star Tribune. The bridge is expected to accommodate up to 71,500 crossings per day, improving access to the Twin Cities while reducing traffic on another nearby crossing.
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The $646 million, four-lane bridge will be the state's largest road and bridge project to date, and it marks a major political and engineering milestone. Critics contend the bridge obscures a natural landscape while advocates say it is necessary transit infrastructure.
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To address critics' concerns, the bridge is extradosed, meaning that it uses cable-stay and box-girder construction to reduce its height and limit the number of pillars anchored in the river.
Dive Insight:
The culmination of the highly anticipated bridge project comes as many U.S. states look to improve their infrastructure and increase interconnectedness from the ground up. That's in part because, taking hints from President Donald Trump's proposed 2018 budget and infrastructure campaign platform, they anticipate the federal government to shift much of the funding responsibility for such projects back to them. Projects that do receive significant federal dollars will have to prove their national importance.
Another driver of the state-level push is the current state of the country's infrastructure, which is widely regarded to be in disrepair. Overall, the country earned a score of D+ on the American Society of Civil Engineers' latest report card and bridges fared only slightly better. The Washington Post notes that there are more than 130,000 structurally unsound or functionally unusable bridges in the U.S., based on 2015 data. Areas with the highest rates of structural deficiency for bridges include Boston (11.7%), Schuylkill County, PA (34.6%), and Nemaha County, NE (54.6%). Federal funds typically go to the bridges with the lowest scores, according to the Post.
States including California, Indiana, Arizona and, most recently, Michigan, are working to correct such deficiencies by pushing for heavy infrastructure investments. To help fill the ASCE's estimated $4.6 trillion gap in funding for critical infrastructure improvements by 2025, some have implemented tax hikes on fuel and vehicle sales as well as tolling and extra registration fees.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao proposed raising the federal gas tax for the first time in more than two decades in order to fund the Trump administration's highly touted $1 trillion infrastructure proposal. And, while some lawmakers are still loath to back tax hikes, a recent Bloomberg poll found that a majority of Americans feel otherwise — if the tax money goes toward improving roads in their state.