Steve Kroft Quotes

Every day in Pittsburgh five million people travel across bridges that either need to be replaced or undergo major repairs.

Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in country when it comes to the condition of its infrastructure, and Philadelphia isn't any better off than Pittsburgh. Nine million people a day travel over 900 bridges classified as structurally deficient, some of them on a heavily traveled section of I-95.

Stretch of I-95 has already had one brush with disaster. In 2008 two contractors from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation stopped to get a sausage sandwich, and parked their cars under this bridge. And fortunately they wanted that sausage sandwich because they saw one of these piers with an eight foot gash in it about five inches wide. And oh, they knew automatically that this bridge was in deep trouble.

When you travel across America, when you take the trains and drive on its roads, when you visit cities in the middle of the country, the dismal—even rotting—state of American infrastructure is surprising.

On the spending, don't forget bridges and roads. It's like puppies and ice cream - who doesn't like them?

The Society of American Civil Engineers, someone who's going to come in and say to the public, we've looked at, we've examined, we've reviewed the repairs and we think they're strong enough to withstand the type of hurricane that - that could hit the city this season.

You can go to any city in America and see roads and bridges that need to be fixed…. I would not call them unsafe … they are dangerous…. The best highway system in the world is falling apart.

We saw firsthand how a collapsed bridge in Skagit County impacted our local economy, which is why we must fix our infrastructure now before it's more expensive to maintain in the future.

I've made it very clear that building, maintaining, and fixing Maryland's roads and bridges is our top transportation priority, and it is a top priority of our administration.

Leaking tunnels, congested roads, rusting bridges, and aging railways often mean one thing: lost opportunity from delays and cancellations.

We are a debtor nation, our airports are third world, our highways are falling apart. Our roads, our bridges, everything, we're like third world.

In America, we have an infrastructure that's so bad, our roads, our highways, our schools, our tunnels, our bridges. Look at our bridges. Half of them have reports that they are in serious danger.

When we have $20 trillion in debt, and our country's a mess, you know, it's one thing to have $20 trillion in debt and our roads are good and our bridges are good and everything's in great shape, our airports. Our airports are like from a third world country.

I think most people would like that: probably comes in about ninety percent. They see their public works crumbling, services inadequate, they have libraries and schools and bridges and highways that have not been repaired.

Yet we didn't fix anything. Our roads are bad, our bridges are bad, our tunnels are bad, our schools are bad, our hospitals are bad.

If I was the governor of New Jersey, the George Washington Bridge would not have been shut.

Events like Hurricane Katrina and the Minnesota bridge collapse suggest a national infrastructure that has suffered from lack of tending.

Federal agencies that own bridges have some of the worst records for on-time inspections. Nearly 3,000 bridges owned by U.S. government agencies went more than two years between checkups.

The I-495 bridge over the Christina River in Wilmington, Delaware, is tilting.

I was in Nashville, Tennessee, and I saw - we talk about crumbling bridges - I saw one, concrete literally falling onto the underpass below, threatening auto traffic.

Most of the locks and dams on the upper Mississippi River system are over 60 years old and many are in serious need of repair and rehabilitation.

Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.

We have over 100,000 bridges in this country old enough to qualify for Medicare.

We should not be waiting until trains derail, bridges collapse and people die to adequately fund our transportation infrastructure.

The I-95 bridges were built in the early 1960s and are now more than 50 years old. The same vintage as the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minnesota back in 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The antiquated Skagit River Bridge in Washington state that collapsed last May after a truck hit one of the trusses was even older. And it's not just bridges. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 32 percent of the major roads in America are now in poor condition and in need of major repairs.