Federal officials: 70,000 bridges have been found structurally deficient

Repairing all spans rated structurally deficient would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion—at least $9.4 billion a year over 20 years.

Those bridges carry an average of more than 300 million vehicles a day.

At least 73,533 of roughly 607,363 bridges in the nation, or about 12 percent, were classified as "structurally deficient," including some built as recently as the early 1990s, according to 2006 statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

geez, to pay for fixing them we might have to cut the iraq war short by a year....

[if you wonder how there can be "more than 300 million vehicles a day" in a country of just over 300 million drivers and non-drivers combined, think of it this way: say you cross two bridges going to work and the same two going home; those four crossings get counted as four "vehicles a day."]