Economics Today 18th Edition by Roger LeRoy Miller

تمرين 2

Do Businesses Want to Transport Products? Sorry , the Bridge Is Out
Bob Wilson, owner of a fleet of 20 trucks based in Pennsylvania, plans to reroute several of his company's trucks. These trucks carry metal ingots along separate highway routes from a Reading plant to Boston, Massachusetts, and from a Latrobe factory to Birmingham, Alabama. The Pennsylvania state government has declared bridges along both routes to be impassable by the firm's heavy trucks and loads of freight, however. Wilson calculates that the longer detours required to cross rivers at different bridges will delay ingot deliveries and boost the per-truckload transportation expense by more than $1,000. Wilson confronts additional rerouting costs across Pennsylvania, in which one of every four bridges requires major repair work or replacement.
Across all 50 states, more than 11 percent of highway or railroad bridges, which have an average age of 42 years, are unsuitable for trucks or trains to carry heavy loads. Rerouting the transport of physical items is slow-ing the transport of products to customers. With fewer functioning bridges available, companies that sell physical goods cannot complete delivery of as many units of these items per unit of time as was feasible in previous years, other things being equal. As more bridges are added to the deficiency lists around the country, the nation's economic growth prospects diminish.
How are bridge deficiencies affecting the extent to which the U.S. long-run aggregate supply curve shifts rightward each year?