Motorists cross over the Brooklyn Bridge heading west into Manhattan. The bridge is one of more than 47,000 in the U.S. considered structurally deficient.

(AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

At a Glance

The report was issued by the American Road and Transportation Building Association.ARTBA identified 47,052 bridges that are considered structurally deficient.If stretched end to end, the bridges would span 1,100 miles.

More than 47,000 bridges across the U.S. are structurally deficient and fixing them could take decades, according to a new report from the American Road and Transportation Builders Association.

“At the current pace, it would take more than 80 years to replace or repair the nation’s structurally deficient bridges. That’s longer than the average life expectancy of a person living in the U.S.,” Alison Premo Black, the ARTBA chief economist who conducted the analysis, said in a statement. “America’s bridge network is outdated, underfunded and in urgent need of modernization. State and local government just haven’t been given the necessary resources to get the job done.”

The annual report is based on an analysis of the U.S. Department of Transportation 2018 National Bridge Inventory database. Among :

47,052 of America’s 616,087 bridges are structurally deficient and considered to be in poor condition.178 million people cross these bridges every day.If placed end to end, the length of the bridges would span nearly 1,100 miles.Nearly 1,775 of the bridges are on the Interstate Highway System, the backbone of the nation’s transportation infrastructure.

Bridges are considered if they have been restricted to light vehicles, closed to traffic or have certain structural parts in need of repair. Structural parts including the deck, superstructure, supports and foundation are rated by inspectors on a scale of one to nine. A four or under is considered deficient.

Some of the most prominent bridges on the list are New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, the Memorial Bridge in Washington D.C., the San Mateo-Hayward bridge over San Francisco Bay, the Robert S. Maestri Bridge over Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana and the Pensacola Bay Bridge in Florida.

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While the number of structurally deficient bridges is down slightly from previous years, the current pace of improvement is at lowest since the ARTBA started compiling the annual reports five years ago.

The report comes as Congress and the Trump administration continue to discuss major legislation to improve the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

with the largest number of structurally deficient bridges are Iowa, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, California, New York, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Bridge collapses due to structural deficits are rare in the U.S. Officials have said a partial bridge collapse on Interstate 75 in on Monday was likely caused by an oversized vehicle striking the bridge. An Interstate 85 bridge collapse two years ago in was caused by an intense fire. No one was killed in either of those incidents.

The most in recent U.S. history include the Sunshine Skyway across Tampa Bay, which was hit by a freighter in 1980, causing 35 deaths; the Cypress Street Viaduct, which collapsed and killed 42 people in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake; and the Big Bayou Canot Bridge in Mobile, Ala., which collapsed after an Amtrak passenger train crossing it derailed and hit one of the bridge’s spans, killing 47.