Assessment of Bridge Inspection and Maintenance in the United States

Abstract

Bridge inspection and maintenance is extremely important to the country since it is the economic lifeblood of the United States business and people relying upon them to do business and get to work. Although bridge disasters are relatively rare, the consequence of a failure can be disastrous. Technical and management problems that under the identification of bridge deficiency and obsolesce need to be identified and solved in order to keep bridges from falling apart. The purpose of this paper is to understand the problem behind bridge inspection and maintenance system in the United States in order to develop potential solutions to solve the problems that the DOTs are facing on the aging bridges and limited budget. A cost management model and a maintenance spending model are analyzed from this research.