Maryland’s Bridge Safety, reported using R

A front-page story in the Baltimore Sun reported last week on the state of the bridges in Maryland. Among the report’s findings:

• 5.4% of bridges are classified in “poor” or “structurally deficient” condition
• 13% of bridges in the city of Baltimore are in “poor” condition

Those findings were the result of analysis of Federal infrastructure data by reporter Christine Zhang. The analysis was performed using R and documented in a Jupyter Notebook published on Github. The raw data included almost 50 variables including type, location, ownership, and inspection dates and ratings, and required a fair bit of processing with tidyverse functions to extract the Marlyland-specific statistics above. The analysis also turned up an unusual owner for one of the bridges: this one — an access road to the Goddard Space Flight Center — is owned by NASA.

You can read the story in the Baltimore Sun, or check out the R analysis in the Github repo linked below.

Github (Baltimore Sun): Maryland bridges analysis (via Sharon Machlis)