At the end of May 2024, the Moseltal bridge made for an unusual sight. Twenty-four bright red trucks had been parked close together in the middle of the wide autobahn bridge at a height of 136 meters (446 feet). The 960-ton load was being used to test how much the 50-plus-year-old structure, now badly worn and damaged, could still withstand. In early 2023, cracks were discovered throughout the steel structure of the nearly 1-kilometer long bridge. The test results are still being evaluated.

The Moseltal bridge is not an isolated case. In Germany, as many as 5,000 of the 40,000 bridges along the country's autobahns are in such poor condition that they urgently need repair. All bridges are inspected regularly and assigned grades based on their structural condition.

More than half of the autobahn bridges were built before 1985, including most of the major valley bridges in former West Germany. As they were designed for less traffic and lighter vehicles, the bridges are now so overloaded that many are showing signs of deterioration. On top of that, too little has been done in recent years to maintain them.

It is not possible to renovate them all at the same time. Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing has called it a generational undertaking and wants to complete around 400 bridges per year. "We are setting new priorities in order to tackle the modernization of bridges strategically and in the most sensible order," he said after the first "bridge summit" in Berlin in 2022.

To do that, planning, procedures, and coordination will need to be simplified to speed up renovation and new construction. An........

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