No matter who you are or where you live, chances are you rely on infrastructure like roads and bridges to get where you’re going. 

Our modern network of civil infrastructure systems is a sign of amazing progress, yet it also “creates a kind of vulnerability,” as Jessica Boakye, UMass Amherst assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, puts it. “We rely deeply on infrastructure, but we don’t have a lot of say in how it’s taken care of,” she says. “When these systems aren’t working, there are real consequences in the lives of ordinary people.”

According to the 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, nearly 40 percent of roads in the U.S. are in poor or mediocre condition, while more than half of all bridges are in poor or fair condition. 

“If you’ve left your house today, chances are high you’ve gone over or under a fair or poor bridge,” says Simos Gerasimidis, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UMass Amherst, whose research group collaborates with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) on research to address the challenge posed by aging bridges.

Meanwhile, the average driver incurs over $1,400 per year in vehicle operating costs and lost time due to driving in deteriorated conditions or on congested roads, and more than 40,000 people lost their lives on U.S. roads in 2023. And ever-more-frequent extreme weather events due to climate change exacerbate challenges with road maintenance and planning.

“We’re constantly operating at a maintenance deficit. We have more infrastructure that needs fixing than resources to fix it,” Boakye explains. “As a result, we need to make smart decisions about which infrastructure to invest in.”

In the UMass Amherst College of Engineering, researchers are developing innovative solutions to address the nation’s aging infrastructure. Their research is paving the way to fixes that hold promise to save time and money, avoid traffic disruption, and even improve equitable access to public infrastructure resources. 

Understanding Broad Impacts on Community Well-Being

According to Boakye, when making decisions on road maintenance, civil engineers traditionally study major, quantifiable metrics related to the consequences of deterioration, such as death, damage, and downtime. 

“It’s important that we get accurate predictions of these metrics for practical purposes. But there are many other societal consequences—which often can be difficult to quantify with a monetary value—that are also important to think about for the well-being of communities,” she says. “We’re trying to broaden the metrics we use so it’s more representative of our society and its values.” 

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Boakye’s group is conducting research to broadly identify possible consequences of bad roads—ranging from excessive fuel consumption to air pollution to mental anguish—and to predict the occurrence of these consequences. From there, they aim to figure out how to optimally mitigate these consequences for the benefit of society.  

Boakye also studies equity issues related to road conditions. A 2024 study she published in Scientific Reports with Egemen Okte, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, found that in Massachusetts, disadvantaged or “environmental justice” (EJ) communities—a designation based on low-income status, high percentage of minority makeup, or low rates of English fluency—were twice as likely as non-EJ communities to have poor roads (21 percent of EJ communities, compared to only 10 percent of non-EJ communities). As a result, 16 percent of commuters from EJ communities used excess gas (compared to driving on perfect road conditions)—twice the rate of commuters from non-EJ communities.

Boakye and Okte are conducting further research to examine other impacts of having poor roads in one’s community, and how these impacts might differ in EJ and non-EJ communities. In June 2025, they received a $40,000 Armstrong Fund for Science award to study social equity considerations of road deterioration more broadly, and how these can be incorporated into infrastructure management decisions.

For example, says Boakye, “Do bad roads in a neighborhood pose safety concerns? Do they create more noise or air pollution? How close must you live to the roads to experience these consequences? As engineers, we want to be able to measure these impacts and find ways to integrate them into systems that haven’t previously considered them.”
 

A Novel Approach to Repairing Aging Bridges

When you’re behind the wheel, few sights are as disheartening as a bright orange “road work ahead” sign. No one enjoys sitting in traffic due to construction, yet such disruptions are necessary to repair deteriorating infrastructure for public safety.

For the past decade, Gerasimidis’s research group has collaborated with the MassDOT on research targeting bridges in the commonwealth, many built after the Second World War and now reaching the end of their natural lifespan. Gerasimidis’s group is using cutting-edge technology and developing innovative solutions to make bridge repairs smarter, more efficient, and ultimately less disruptive to the public.

Through this collaboration, the MassDOT has provided actual beams from old bridges, which the UMass researchers study in the university’s Robert B. Brack Structural Testing Facility. In a series of experiments, using high-fidelity computational modeling, the researchers developed a new set of guidelines to assess the remaining capacity of corroded beams. These were ultimately incorporated into the state's Bridge Manual and are now used by engineers working on bridge safety for the state. The UMass researchers have also utilized cutting-edge 3D Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology to scan bridge beams to produce detailed maps of corrosion, providing valuable information for bridge maintenance.

From there, the researchers turned their attention to bridge repairs, exploring additive manufacturing methods—commonly known as 3D printing—which they believe could save time and money, and be less disruptive to passing traffic compared to traditional repair methods. For more than a decade, 3D printing has been used to repair structures such as submarines, airplanes, and ships, but bridges present unique challenges due to their size and because the 3D printer must be brought on site to perform repairs.

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With support from the MassDOT, the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Federal Highway Administration, UMass researchers partnered with the research group of Professor John Hart at MIT, with expertise in metals, to explore different 3D printing techniques in the lab. They found the “cold spray” technique to be optimal for bridge repairs. According to Gerasimidis, this technique involves heating up steel particles in a powder form, thus accelerating their velocity, then throwing the particles onto the bridge surface. The speed involved allows the particles to bond with the bridge surface. The metal powder is sprayed on in layers, building up thickness and repairing corrosion.

The cold spray technique has several advantages. It is “cold” by metal standards, meaning it does not heat up enough to alter the mechanical properties of the bridge surface. The application machine, while still large, is portable enough to bring to bridges.

On May 14, 2025, a successful first-of-its-kind, proof-of-concept demonstration of the cold spray technique was used to repair a patch on the red bridge, formerly known as the “Brown Bridge,” first built in 1949, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. “The repair went very smoothly and was completed in under four hours, much quicker than expected,” Gerasimidis reports. [Read more about this demonstration.]

“I think this method has a huge potential to change the game in bridge repair. With this technology, we think we can do cheaper, faster repairs than what is done now,” says Gerasimidis. “There is still work to be done in terms of research and development, however, and ultimately this technology will have to undergo a thorough review process for safety before it can be deployed widely.”
 

This story was originally published in July 2025.