Oklahoma hasn’t done a good job of taking care of its roads and bridges, the state transportation director said this week.

Oklahoma Department of Transportation Director Gary Ridley said that over the past two decades, his department didn’t have enough money to keep up with user demand and the increasing cost of materials.

“We have not done a very good job in maintaining and updating and planning for the future,” he said. “It’s really all tied to money.”

Speaking Wednesday at a breakfast meeting of the Cleveland County Business and Industry Council, Ridley described the state’s transportation system as “huge” and needing “a lot of money to maintain.”

“It’s a huge system we’re responsible for,” he said. “And it takes a lot of money to maintain it, to rebuild it, and a lot of money to keep it working.”

Ridley said the system — which has 12,266 miles of roads and 6,700 bridges — is the 17th largest transportation system in the country. “We have more bridges than Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Wisconsin and Michigan. And twice as many bridges as Colorado.”

Roads and bridges, he said, which are beginning to show major signs of aging.

“The Minnesota bridge collapse about six weeks ago brought a lot of attention to a problem that Oklahomans are well versed on. We lead the nation in the number of structurally deficient bridges.”

Ridley said Oklahoma has eight bridges similar to the one that failed in Minnesota. “The bridge down here, toward Lexington, is a similar type construction. It’s a deck truss with fracture critical members.”

However, unlike the Minnesota bridge, the Lexington structure — about 3,500 feet long — was rehabilitated about three years ago by ODOT.

“We spent about $3.5 million to rehab that bridge,” he said. “And it had traffic balled up and tied up for about a year. Had we been force to replace it, it would have cost between $35 (million) and $40 million.”

Ridley said about 1,500 state bridges are “functionally obsolete or structurally deficient.”

“A structurally deficient bridge is one that can no longer carry the load it was designed for, or a bridge which wasn’t designed for the load it is carrying,” he said. “And right now, about 1,100 bridges fall into that category.”

Five hundred other bridges are functionally obsolete — too narrow for the vehicles that travel on them.

“We have 135 bridges which were built before 1932. And the significance of that is Henry Ford quit making the Model A in 1932. That means the bridges designed and built in that era were designed and built for the load the Model A carried,” he said.