The story
What the records show
MassDOT’s inventory lists 3,735 bridges owned by cities and towns; 417 are rated poor, and the work proposed for those comes to about $1.15 billion by the state’s planning estimates (short spans priced at the federal unit cost). Of the poor ones, 202 are short spans of 10 to 20 feet, the size MassDOT’s Small Bridge Program funds. From FY2017 to FY2026 the program paid $57.6 million to 103 towns.
One step from poor
Inspectors rate a bridge’s deck, superstructure and substructure (or the culvert, for a culvert-type structure) from 9, excellent, to 0, failed. The lowest of the ratings sets the bridge’s condition: 7 to 9 is good, 5 or 6 is fair, 4 or below is poor. Of the town-owned bridges with a recorded rating, 1,043 are good, 985 are rated 6, 784 are rated 5 and 417 are poor.
The 784 bridges rated 5 are the closest to poor. The work proposed for them comes to about $1.48 billion by the same planning estimates; for most of those carrying the state’s estimate, the work proposed is rehabilitation rather than replacement. A Federal Highway Administration article on its bridge preservation guide states that preservation treatments “often cost much less than major reconstruction or replacement activities” and that deferring them leads to worse condition and costlier work (FHWA, 2011). No published source estimates what preserving each town’s 5s would cost, so this page gives the state’s planning estimate of the work proposed for each, not a preservation price. The table below lists every town’s bridges by rating (download).
How the cost is estimated. For bridges in the federal inventory, the page uses the planning estimate MassDOT records there: the total project cost, which applies the Federal Highway Administration’s standard 150% allowance for approaches, engineering and other costs to an estimated cost of the bridge work, which may be replacement or rehabilitation. For short spans outside that inventory, it uses deck area times the federal replacement unit cost for Massachusetts ($981 per square foot), which prices the structure alone. These are planning figures, and real projects vary widely around them. Against MassDOT’s 2022 list of funded bridge projects, programmed costs for town bridges ran a median of about three-quarters of the planning estimate (about the same after construction inflation since) and about twice the unit-cost figure. Brookside Road over the Housatonic in Great Barrington, closed in May 2024: $3.3 million at the unit cost, $10.3 million in the federal inventory, $10.9 million in MassDOT’s contract estimate. Cottage Street in the same town was programmed at $3.85 million in 2022, against $9.7 million in the federal inventory. Of the 417 poor bridges, 184 carry the federal-inventory estimate. Records MassDOT keeps for a bridge since rebuilt at the same place are left out.
Towns own 476 dams rated high or significant hazard. The Dam and Seawall program made 139 dam awards to towns worth $48.2 million, and Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness action grants added 15 dam projects worth $8.1 million; 113 towns that own 207 such dams received neither, through FY2027 to date. These are awards to the town as grantee: some pay to remove a dam rather than repair it, and some are for a dam the town does not own. No repair-cost estimate is published for town-owned dams. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates $2.0 billion to rehabilitate the Massachusetts dams it counts as less than satisfactory, whoever owns them, among the state’s 1,298 non-federal dams in the national inventory; $460 million of it is for dams among the 306 rated high hazard (2023 estimate). Field crews of the North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaborative have assessed 6,166 of the state’s 30,385 mapped road-stream crossings and found 4,241 that block or reduce passage for fish and other aquatic life (1,824 block it); the count covers roads of every owner, and how many crossings have been assessed varies widely by town. The Division of Ecological Restoration made 152 culvert awards to towns worth $14.9 million, and the action grants added 23 culvert projects worth $9.5 million.
“No award” means none from these programs. A town may have fixed a bridge or dam with Chapter 90, local money, an earmark or federal aid, which these figures do not count. MassDOT does not publish Small Bridge award amounts or the bridges they fund, so bridge money here is payments found in the Comptroller’s records.