Where The Bad Bridges Are

One of the arguments for pork-barrel politics is that local pols know what their districts need. And infrastructure does matter, as we've found out after the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge. Do the big porkers succeed in fixing their own districts better than other congressmen or senators? This graphic can help you cross-tab the amount of a pork in a district with the number of functionally obsolete bridges. There seems to be a negative correlation:

The five states with the highest pork to functionally obsolete bridges ratio are:

    * Hawaii: $2,283,244.19 per bridge
    * Nevada: $2,767,920.10 per bridge
    * West Virginia: $3,219,261.98 per bridge
    * North Dakota: $4,575,615.67 per bridge
    * Alaska: $9,184,510.00 per bridge.

Isn't Ted Stevens the best?