Photo by Cary Scott

The District’s roads, bridges, and water systems are terribly out of date and in need of billions of dollars’ worth of repairs and upgrades. What else is new? But the state of D.C.’s infrastructure—and that of the rest of the country—is visualized in a new report card issued today by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

According to ASCE, 99 percent of D.C.’s streets are in poor or mediocre condition, which translate to an added cost of $833 per year for the average driver. Thirty of the District’s 239 bridges are marked as structurally deficient, while ASCE considers 155 bridges “functionally obsolete.” Last week, the District government announced it would spend $110 million to fix up the city’s bridges.

The figures offered by ASCE are far more severe than those presented earlier this month by the District Department of Transportation. At a D.C. Council oversight hearing, DDOT officials said that 43 percent of local roads are in excellent or good condition, while 55.5 percent of federal rodes are in that shape.

The city’s water treatment systems are also in need of much re-investment, the ASCE report card states. D.C. needs $874 million to maintain and upgrade its drinking water over the next 20 years, and $2.5 billion for wastewater treatment over the same period.

Not every segment of D.C.’s infrastructure report card was so grim, though. The civil engineers’ group praised the District’s Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, which will spend $10 billion over three decades to revitalize the areas along the Anacostia River, including the new 11th Street bridges and the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail. It also noted the District’s response to last year’s frequent flooding of the Bloomingdale neighborhood by adding 12 million gallons of stormwater storage at the old McMillan sand filtration facility.