National Bridge Inventory 2007
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
By popular demand, I've taken the latest edition of the National Bridge Inventory and produced a set of tab-delimited files suitable for importing into Excel or OpenOffice. Warning: This is a huge 36 MB ZIP file that expands to almost 300 MB when uncompressed. If you just want to peruse a few bridges, Nationalbridges.com might be more convenient.
The Federal Highway Administration only started posting the raw NBI data on their website last year. Prior to that, the agency was paranoid that terrorists could somehow use the data, particularly the GPS coordinates, for nefarious purposes. Thankfully they've come to their senses. In a memo dated May 17, 2007, the FHWA concluded that:
[T]he NBI data does not present information not otherwise publicly available that would likely assist persons in targeting a specific structure or planning an attack on a structure.
The memo also adds this tidbit:
It is also noteworthy that a recent study found that because potential terrorists have numerous options for gathering mission-critical attack information, government Agency data is unlikely to be a primary source of information. The study found that less than 1 percent of 629 Federal data sets reviewed by researchers appeared to have notable value for would-be attackers.
With the collapse of the I-35W Bridge, it's more important than ever for this information to be readily available to the public.