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Long famous for its top-notch highways and passion for cars, the United States is letting bridges rust as traffic chokes overburdened roads, threatening a pillar of its economic strength.
A prime example of this neglect is the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River. It worked well when it opened in 1963. Now it handles twice the traffic it was designed to support. Gridlock often stretches for a mile beneath a thick haze of smog.
"As you're coming across the bridge into Cincinnati you can tell when traffic has slowed because you can see the cloud," said Margaret Drury, an engineer at United Parcel Service.
UPS trucks avoid the bridge as much as possible but that adds time to its routes, pushing up costs, Drury said.
Two interstate highways come together at the river crossing, with a UPS distribution center to the north and the company's global air shipping hub to the south.
The bottleneck illustrates the decline of American infrastructure that is already hurting the U.S. economy. The trend shows little sign of being reversed.
The United States has fallen sharply in the World Economic Forum's ranking of national infrastructure systems. In the forum's 2007-2008 report, American infrastructure was ranked 6th best in the world.
The 2011-2012 report due in September will show America at No. 16, with South Korea overtaking the United States during the last year, according to a copy of the rankings obtained by Reuters.
The quality of American roads is about on par with those of Malaysia. They lag Hong Kong, whose infrastructure tops the overall list.
For the full article, visit Reuters.
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