The American Society of Civil Engineers released its 2009 Infrastructure Report Card yesterday, and the conclusion is that the nation is a “D” student.

“Poorly maintained, unable to meet current and future demands, and in some cases, unsafe” is the ASCE’s assessment.

The full report won’t be released until late March, but the situation has worsened since the ASCE issued its last infrastructure report card in 2005. Only one of the 15 categories was upgraded (energy), while aviation, roads and transit all received lower grades. The other 11 categories were unchanged.

Key observations:

• One of every four bridges in the U.S. is either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete;
• The average age of the nation’s 85,000 dams is 51 years; and
• Americans spend 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic at a cost to the economy of $78.2 billion, or $710 per motorist.

ASCE now says it will cost $2.2 trillion to bring America’s infrastructure up to acceptable standards. That’s up 38 percent from the $1.6 trillion figure cited in the 2005 report card.

The lesson is clear—the longer we wait on these fixes, the more expensive they get. President Obama is emphasizing infrastructure to restart the economy, and there’s a secondary benefit: roads and bridges that we can trust.

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President Obama is asking for $13 billion for a high-speed passenger rail system, saying its creation “will lead to innovations that change the way we travel in America.”

Proposed plans include linking Los Angeles and San Francisco with a high-speed rail that would make it only a two-hour trip. Below is a map of the ten high-speed corridors outlined in the President’s plan.

Train travel is already more popular than most people realize. Amtrak carried nearly 30 million passengers last year, up 11 percent from 2007. The chart below shows a steady upward trend since the mid-1990s.

The fastest growth has been on rail lines linking major cities less than 500 miles apart, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Such routes include the Boston-Washington corridor, the Bay Area to Sacramento and Milwaukee-Chicago.

In its 2009 infrastructure report, the ASCE gave America’s rail network a grade of “C-,” which is mediocre but nevertheless better than the “D” earned by America’s overall infrastructure.

The ASCE estimates that $63 billion in rail investment will be needed over the next five years to meet increasing passenger and freight demand.

About $51 billion has already been budgeted for rails, according to estimates, leaving roughly $12 billion in unmet need. That’s where President Obama’s proposal comes in—if it’s approved, there will be more than enough money for the necessary upgrades.

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Two of the Middle East’s most promising economies will soon be joined together by the world’s longest bridge. The Qatar-Bahrain Friendship Causeway is set to begin construction later this year.

Spanning roughly 24 miles, the causeway would take nine hours to walk across and is the equivalent of 536 Boeing 747s lying end-to-end.

The $2.3 billion bridge, which includes a railroad, is expected to take five years to construct.  Once completed, 10,000 to 12,000 vehicles will use it daily to cut what’s now a four-and-a-half-hour drive to a mere 40 minutes.

A stronger connection between the two nations should be a catalyst for business activity. Qatar’s 9.5 percent GDP growth in 2009 was the fastest in the world and the country currently ranks as the second richest in the world in terms of GDP per capita ($122,000).

Already a banking center of the Arab world, the causeway should aide Bahrain in its efforts to diversify the country’s economy away from oil and natural gas. In recent years, Bahrain has worked to expand trade with both the United States and surrounding countries in the Middle East, including Qatar.