Top 25 Illinois Counties with the Most Deficient Bridges

More than 134 million crossings occur each day on Illinois’ 26,588 bridges, which span nearly 13 million square miles.

Of those 26,588 state and federal bridges, 2,216 are structurally deficient, meaning one or more key bridge components — deck, superstructure or substructure — is considered to be in poor or worse condition, according to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association’s review of 2014 data from the Federal Highway Administration. An additional 1,971 are classified as functionally obsolete, which means a bridge’s design is no longer sufficient for its current use.

For a fairer comparison, we’ve divided the total number of deficient bridges by the total number of bridges in each county since more populated counties typically have a greater number of bridges.

Here are the top 25 counties with the highest percentage of deficient bridges to total count. We also included the top 10 most traveled structurally deficient bridges in Illinois, which you probably have crossed many times.

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