How to Save America's Crumbling Bridges While Congress Gets Its Funding Act Together

The weather in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007, was hot, topping out at 92 degrees. It was the perfect day to visit a water park, which is where a school bus carrying summer campers was returning from during the evening rush hour, when the I-35W bridge across the Mississippi River gave way. Thankfully, the bus didn't plunge into the river—it got wedged between a guardrail and a burning semi-trailer—and all 63 kids made it out safely. But 13 others who happened to be driving over the bridge at the time of its collapse never made it home.

The I-35W disaster might have inspired federal lawmakers to invest more money in America's 600,000-plus bridges, a quarter of which have been deemed either "structurally deficient" or "functionally obsolete." But Congress can barely keep the highway trust fund solvent, let alone agree on a new transportation financing mechanism. Each time the funding question gets postponed, the average age of U.S. bridges goes up (it already exceeds 40 years), as does the risk of another disaster on the scale of Minneapolis'.