Bill aims to ID problem bridges

Talk about it

A bill has been introduced at the state capitol that would put color-coded signs on Minnesota’s worst bridges in an effort to educate Minnesota drivers about the condition of the bridges they use every day.

The bill, introduced by District 67 Sen. Mee Moua, DFL-St. Paul, has been tabled in the Senate Transportation Committee as Moua works with the Minnesota Department of Transportation to address concerns it has over the plan.

While Moua said the bill is meant to provide transparency in the state’s transportation system and educate the public on the condition of bridges, other local legislators aren’t so sure it’s the right means to achieve those ends.

Under the language of the bill, red signs would be posted on the approaches to trunk highway bridges with average daily traffic counts of more than 1,000 and sufficiency ratings at or less than 50.

Fracture critical bridges with sufficiency ratings of less than 80 would get orange signs, and any bridge scheduled for major repairs or replacement would get a yellow sign.

The Hastings bridge carries about 32,000 vehicles per day and its sufficiency rating is 38.1, which means the bridge would get a red sign.

Moua wrote the bill to correspond to the three tier system for bridge replacement set up in the recently passed state transportation bill. That bill uses similar language when classifying bridges into tiers.

District 57 Sen. Katie Sieben, DFL-Cottage Grove, said she agrees that MnDOT needs to be more transparent and give information to people about the condition of bridges, but she doesn’t think the bill in its current form is a good way to do that.

Sieben said she thinks the signs would be a distraction to drivers. The way the bill is written, there’s no text on the signs; they’re just colored squares. Sieben thinks that’s too ambiguous and there would have to be a statewide education campaign to teach people what the different colored signs mean.

District 57B Rep. Denny McNamara, R-Hastings, said he thinks it’s a good thing for people to be aware of the condition of bridges, but agrees with Sieben that in its current form the bill would require a statewide education campaign to be effective.

McNamara said if the bill starts a discussion about how MnDOT can be more transparent, it’s a good thing, but he’s not a big supporter of the bill.

Sieben said a few ways MnDOT could be more transparent is to come up with a bridge rating system that’s easier for the public to understand, ensuring the public has easy access to that type of information and making information available to the public faster (citing the several months MnDOT took to release the fracture critical report on the Hastings bridge).

Moua said she’s not an alarmist and the intent of her bill isn’t to scare people. She said constituents raised the idea of installing some sort of simple signs on bridges to tell people their condition.

“They just want to know if their bridge is safe or not,” she said.

Once the knowledge is out there and people can see it every time they drive over a bridge, she hopes they’ll become more aware of the condition of the state’s bridges and thus, more involved in doing something about them.

“The only way to get the public involved is to educate them,” Moua said.

MnDOT officials testified in front of the Senate Transportation Committee against the bill in it’s current form because of the cost of implementing it.

Moua could not give any cost estimates, saying she’s still waiting on them.

MnDOT also objected to the bill because it says it already has that information available for people on its Web site.

If the specifics of the bill can’t be worked out this session, Moua said she’d try again next year.

Tags: minnesota_news, bridges, broken, plan