(The Center Square) – Wisconsin’s highway system ranks 31st in performance and cost-effectiveness, a drop from ranking 26th a year before in a report from Reason Foundation released Thursday.
The report and 50-state rankings take into account 13 categories of data that include everything from highway expenditures per mile to Interstate and primary road pavement conditions, urbanized area congestion, bridge conditions and fatality rates.
Wisconsin ranks 28th in capital and bridge disbursements, 14th in maintenance disbursements, and its administrative disbursements rank 22nd of the 50 states.
Wisconsin ranked 21st in traffic congestion with drivers spending 17 hours a year stuck in traffic jams. And the state ranked 45th in urban arterial pavement condition while ranking 26th in rural Interstate pavement condition and 40th in rural arterial pavement condition.
“In terms of improving in the road condition and performance categories, Wisconsin should focus on improving its Rural Arterial and Urban Arterial Pavement Conditions, as well as addressing inefficiencies in Other Disbursements,” Baruch Feigenbaum, lead author of the 29th Annual Highway Report and senior managing director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, said in the report. “While the state performs strongly in Maintenance Disbursements (14th), Urban Fatality Rate (5th), and Other Fatality Rate (7th), its poor performance in arterial pavement condition and spending inefficiencies remain challenges.”
Wisconsin ranked 29th in structurally deficient bridges while ranking fifth in urban fatality rate and 14th in rural fatality rate.
