America Letter: Bridge-builder Biden hopes investments pay off

Pittsburgh is a city of bridges.

Many of them beautiful steel structures made from the alloy for which the city is famous.

The large bridges span the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, which converge in the city to form the Ohio river which flows all the way to the Mississippi.

Overall, locals claim that between the big and the small there are more than 400 bridges in the Pittsburgh area. However, all that bridgework is expensive to maintain. And across the United States in the past, sufficient money was not always available to keep the roads, tunnels, and bridges in the optimum condition.

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Walking across one of the main bridges in Pittsburgh linking downtown to the Station Square riverfront dining and entertainment area this week, in places it was possible to peer straight down through little holes to the water below. Parts of the pavement running across the bridge appeared to have simply eroded or rusted away.

But this is not just a Pittsburgh or even a Pennsylvania problem.

The White House this week said there are 45,000 bridges across the country that need to be repaired or replaced.

It said that in Pennsylvania alone, there are 3,100 bridges and 7,500 miles of highway in poor condition.

US president Joe Biden was in Pittsburgh this week to talk about bridges.

The city was very fortunate last January when the Fern Hollow bridge in the city suddenly collapsed early in the morning. The bridge fell about 30 metres (100 feet) while five cars and a bus were crossing. Ten people were injured in the incident. However, as the president said on Thursday, it could have been “a complete catastrophe”.

“But by the grace of God, the school was delayed that day because of snow, and it was just before rush hour, so there was less traffic than usual. Had it been a normal day, it would’ve been much, much worse.”

The crash happened as the president was preparing to leave Washington to visit Pittsburgh to give a speech about manufacturing. Instead he went straight to the site of the incident.

On Thursday, he returned to see work being carried out on the restoration of the Fern Hollow bridge. He said reconstruction would be completed by Christmas and promised he would be back in the city to walk across the new structure.

Of course there was politics at play. There are elections to be won in Pennsylvania in less than three weeks and Biden’s party is behind in the polls.

But behind it all there is a more serious issue about infrastructure across the United States.

Many Irish people view American roads and bridges and tunnels only through a TV screen. There are hugely impressive motorways with numerous lanes, and often bewildering spiral junctions that connect cities across thousands of miles. But many roads are in a serious state of disrepair.

And outside of the north east region, railways are primarily used for freight. Locals point out that the single passenger train each day that travels between Pittsburgh and the city of Cleveland in Ohio, about 213km away, leaves at midnight and arrives at just before 3am. The timetable is designed to have passengers in Chicago for breakfast time rather than for the train to operate as a more local service.

The Biden administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress last year passed a landmark $1.2 trillion programme to rebuild infrastructure across the country. In part, it was to promote this initiative that the president was in Pittsburgh on Thursday.

That investment in infrastructure is needed across the United States is evident to most people. However, only 13 opposition Republican members in the House of Representatives voted for the legislation. Biden said this week that some of his critics denounced the infrastructure spending as “socialism” but have now quietly been lobbying him for money to be earmarked for projects in their constituencies. All politics is, after all, local.

The infrastructure initiative was not just about bricks and mortar projects. Just like in Ireland, the United States, the home of the internet and big tech, has its own problems in relation to broadband connectivity.

The president said that 21 per cent of Pennsylvania families did not have internet connections at home.

Biden spoke of parents having to drive their children to the car park of a local McDonald’s so they could avail of its free internet access to allow them to do their homework.

He promised this would never have to happen in the future and that no one would be left behind when high-speed broadband eventually reached all parts, urban and rural.