Every four years or so, the American Society of Civil Engineers releases a list of grades assessing the country’s infrastructure.
Each state also gets its own report card, and the ASCE Texas Section this week released its report on the state of Texas’ roads, bridges, dams and more.
For analysis on the state’s infrastructure, the Texas Standard was joined by Austin Messerli, co-chair of the report.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Texas Standard: Well, it’s a very interesting, fascinating report card to read. And it covers 16 different categories. What are those categories?
Austin Messerli: So, the 16 categories we covered in this release are:
– Aviation
– Bridges
– Broadband
– Dams
– Drinking water
– Energy
– Hazardous waste
– Levees
– Ports
– Public parks
– Rail
– Roads
– Solid waste
– Stormwater
– Transit
– Wastewater
Of those 16, where does Texas seem to be doing the best?
The highest grades in the report were for aviation and roads. They were the only two that improved from our 2021 report.
Aviation is now a B, the highest grade in the report. Some of the positive trends we cited include highly rated airfield infrastructure, pavement conditions, and expansion projects currently underway at many of the state’s biggest airports.
I’m happy to hear about bridges being a B-, but still above the average level.
Correct. Bridges did not increase but maintained a very high B- grade. That’s thanks to only 1.2% of bridges being listed in poor condition, which is the third lowest rate in the nation.
Now, where are we doing the worst according to this report card?
There were six of the 16 categories that actually, their grades went down from 2021. These include drinking water, energy, levees, solid waste, transit, and wastewater.
And there’s no coincidence that many of these categories are most impacted by extreme weather events such as heat, cold and wind, or changing usage and demands. Drinking water, for example, is now a D+ (down from a C-), and wastewater is a D- (down from a D) from our 2021 report card.
So, what we’re talking about – and this has been part of the conversation as we’ve seen our population grow and as we’ve seen more intense weather – is that our infrastructure has not been upgraded as rapidly as it should be, I presume?
That’s correct. A lot of these – especially the two that I just mentioned, drinking water and wastewater – we’re seeing the effects of aging infrastructure that isn’t being replaced or upgraded fast enough.
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Something that surprised me was how we scored on broadband – a D+. Tell us more.
Well, this was the first time broadband was categorized and graded. As we know, moving out of the pandemic, broadband became ever so important to just livelihoods and being able to access that from either a work standpoint or an education standpoint.
So this is really our first data point that we have on the Texas infrastructure report card that starts analyzing broadband. And as we all understand, Texas is a very large state, and not just broadband, but many of these, is trying to cover this entire state not only takes time, but it also takes significant efforts. And so we’re moving in those directions to help fill in that gap.
But from a grade standpoint, this is our first time to really analyze that because we know this is almost as important to other people as any of the other infrastructure categories.
How do you how do you come up with a D+, especially in a first year ranking this?
Well, all our grades, all our categories, are analyzed on eight criteria. And some of those criteria are funding, safety, operation and maintenance, and future resiliency. And so we analyze each one of those and look up publicly available data to see what data applies to which criteria, and then develop our scoring off of that.
What do you consider to be an acceptable grade? And this is the report card comparison: I think a lot of parents would say ‘nothing less than an A or B is acceptable in our house.’ But I understand you all have a different way of thinking about things.
We do categorize in a similar, easily digestible A-B-C-D format that we’re all familiar from elementary school to high school and even higher education.
And so C does mean our infrastructure is in adequate condition, but it still requires attention. An A would mean that our infrastructure networks meet current and future needs, and they’re completely covered.
As we understand from living in Texas, we do have trouble with some of our infrastructure at different times. Now, that doesn’t mean all the time. But there are impacts that happen where we have stormwater overflows, we have flooding, we have loss of energy demand where our lights don’t turn on, or we go to the faucet and maybe our water doesn’t turn on, or we have a boil notice.
And so those are all things that indicate that we are not meeting the current or future needs, because we do experience those, unfortunately.
A D is poor, and we have several poors here; we talked about drinking water and wastewater. Any Fs on the Texas report card?
No, sir. No Fs.
We haven’t talked about the average for this 2025 report card. What does ASCE say about Texas infrastructure overall?
So for this 2025 report card, our overall grade for the entire infrastructure across the state is a C. And as I mentioned earlier, C means that our infrastructure is in adequate condition but still requires that attention.
And so a lot of the questions we get [are] well, how does that compare to either other states or the nation in general? We scored the same C grade as our report card released in 2021. But we are still one notch higher than the nation’s average of a C-.