Brent Spence Bridge ranked 2nd-worst bottleneck in U.S.

Most Tri-State commuters agree: The Brent Spence Bridge is just the worst. Turns out, there’s data to prove it.

In fairness, the Brent Spence Bridge is actually only the second-worst in the U.S. when it comes to traffic choke points, according to this year’s “Top 100 Truck Bottlenecks” list, released every year by the American Transporta- tion Research Institute.

The rankings are based primarily on how quickly vehicles can move through the corridor during both rush and non-rush hours and how much of that traffic carries freight, along with a handful of other criteria. ATRI collects speed data from semitrailers carrying goods through the busy corridors to inform the rankings.

Mark Policinski, CEO of the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments, said the report “comes as no shock” and described the bridge as a “fatal flaw in our regional infrastructure.”

“In a few short years, we’ve seen the bridge significantly worsen in terms of safely and efficiently transporting freight and families,” he said in a news release Thursday, referring to the bridge’s rise from No. 5 rank last year to No. 2 this year.

The Brent Spence sits at the confluence of Interstates 71 and 75, both major freight corridors. Recent OKI estimates measure the bridge carries roughly 3% of the nation’s gross domestic prod- uct every year, and the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet says more than 160,000 vehicles, on average, cross the bridge each day.

The only bottleneck worse than the Brent Spence: the Interstate 95 corridor in Fort Lee, N.J., which leads across the George Washington Bridge into New York.

Policinski said its peren- nial top-10 bottleneck rank- ing demonstrates the need to build a second, supple- mental bridge alongside the Brent Spence.

“There is no debate that the situation calls for a new bridge,” he said in Thurs- day’s release.

Debate or not, the hurdles to building another bridge are significant: Namely, the estimated cost to build a new bridge topped $3 billion in 2020, a figure that continues to grow with each passing month with no clear way to pay for it.

Late last year, a crash involving two semitrailers — one carrying hazardous material residue — was serious enough to close the bridge entirely in both directions for a period of six weeks, send- ing major traffic disruptions rippling across Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky