America has over 600,000 bridges, and most of us cross them without a second thought. We’re sipping coffee, scrolling through a playlist, barely noticing the steel and concrete holding us over rivers, highways, and ravines below. But here’s the thing – a lot of those bridges are in far worse shape than you’d ever guess from the driver’s seat.
In 2024, over 4.9 billion motor vehicle trips were taken daily across the nation’s 623,218 bridges – and of those, nearly 7 percent are rated in poor condition. According to the ASCE’s 2025 report, over 46,000 bridges in the United States are structurally deficient. Some of them are iconic. Some of them you’ve probably crossed yourself. Let’s take a closer look at five that stand out for all the wrong reasons.
1. Pulaski Skyway – Newark to Jersey City, New Jersey: The “Death Highway” in the Sky
Designed by Sigvald Johannesson, the General Casimir Pulaski Skyway opened in 1932 as the last part of the Route 1 Extension, one of the first freeways or “super-highways” in the United States, built to provide a connection to the Holland Tunnel. That sounds impressive, right? Unfortunately, because of two 11-foot wide lanes in each direction, no shoulders, and a breakdown center lane known as “suicide lane,” the bridge has actually been called the “death highway” for decades. The name alone should tell you something.
By the 1950s, the Skyway was averaging over 400 crashes per year. In mid-1956, an aluminum median barrier was added to prevent head-on crashes and the roadway was resurfaced to make it less slippery. The Pulaski Skyway was eventually considered functionally obsolete because it did not meet modern highway bridge standards and was rated structurally deficient in 2007. It serves as an express link for car and bus traffic to and from New York City, carrying around 74,000 vehicles a day. A tragic car crash in 2024 brought these safety concerns back into sharp focus.
2. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge – Staten Island to Brooklyn, New York: Beautiful, Busy, and Broken
There is something almost cruel about the Verrazano. It is gorgeous – sweeping cables, massive towers, a gateway into New York City that looks like something from a postcard. The Verrazano Bridge, connecting Staten Island with Brooklyn, is the busiest in New York State that is rated structurally deficient. It was completed in 1961 and carries, on average, more than 175,000 vehicles every day. That is a staggering number of daily crossings on a bridge officially flagged for structural concerns.
Although New York State has made progress improving its infrastructure over the last decade, it still has roughly 11 percent of its bridges rated as structurally deficient. Of the more than 17,000 bridges in the state, almost 2,000 require significant repairs to make them structurally sound. The bridge has seen many suicides and suicide attempts over the years, including at least three in 2020, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 2021, the city began putting up strong steel safety fencing to hopefully prevent more. The structural deficiency designation and the staggering daily traffic load make this one worth watching closely.
3. Arlington Memorial Bridge – Washington, D.C.: Dangerous Right Under Congress’s Nose
Here is a fact that should make you pause. One of America’s most politically symbolic bridges, connecting the nation’s capital directly to Virginia, has long been a documented danger. Despite having the fewest number of deficient bridges in the nation, D.C. topped the list for daily crossings over structurally deficient bridges – and the Arlington Memorial Bridge has been a long-standing danger to those driving across it, despite being right outside the buildings where decisions are made about infrastructure projects.
While emergency repairs were made to the bridge in 2015, it is estimated that roughly 250 million dollars will be needed to fix the overpass entirely. Let’s be real – it takes a special kind of irony for lawmakers debating infrastructure funding to commute across a bridge that desperately needs exactly that. In 2024, over 63,000 of the nation’s bridges were posted for load, meaning they have restrictions on the weight of vehicles that can safely cross – and posted bridges can cause heavy vehicle operators to take alternate routes, increasing travel time for emergency response vehicles, commercial trucks, and school buses. The Arlington Memorial Bridge is a living symbol of the gap between political discussion and real action.
4. The Calcasieu River Bridge – Lake Charles, Louisiana: Rusted, Overdue, and Still Open
Drive across the Calcasieu River Bridge in Louisiana and you will feel something off about it. That slight unease is well founded. In 2020, the Louisiana Department of Transportation declared that because the bridge “needs to be replaced to meet today’s federal highway standards,” they approved a plan to fund and build a new bridge. A year later, the Calcasieu was still so deteriorated that President Joe Biden used it for a 2021 photo-op to push his infrastructure bill.
The bridge sees a staggering 86,800 daily crossings. According to Louisiana officials, the backlog of maintenance in the state currently sits at a whopping 15 billion dollars – and the Calcasieu River Bridge is at the center of that wish list for new projects. While Louisiana will receive about 7.5 billion dollars from the infrastructure package, it will still need additional funding. Tens of thousands of drivers cross this aging structure every single day, and the clock on its replacement has been ticking for years longer than it should have.
America’s bridges tell a deeper story about how a nation treats its own foundations. About a third of the nation’s bridge inventory, spanning over 220,000 structures, needs repair work or replacement, and approximately 45 percent of bridges have exceeded their planned design lives of 50 years. Without added government money or cash supplied through public-private partnerships, it could take approximately 30 years to complete the current backlog of repairs needed on all the deficient bridges in the United States.
The Fern Hollow collapse proved what happens when warnings go ignored long enough. The Pulaski Skyway proved that decades of crashes can become so normalized they barely make the news. Every bridge on this list is a reminder that infrastructure is not a background issue – it is as immediate and personal as the road under your wheels. So the next time you cross a bridge, maybe take one extra second to think about what is holding you up. What would you do if the answer turned out to be: not much?
<p>The post These Are Top 5 America’s Most Dangerous Bridges – Would You Risk Crossing Them? first appeared on Travelbinger.</p>