Building for the Next 100 Years: Lessons Learned
Date Posted: August 18, 2026
Posted In: Discussion,
From Construction Digest: As the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, an iconic bridge marks a milestone of its own. In July 2026, the Benjamin Franklin Bridge connecting Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey, turns 100 years old. The chief engineer of the bridge was Polish-born Ralph Modjeski, founder of the firm now known as Modjeski and Masters.
When the Benjamin Franklin Bridge opened in 1926, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Today, it remains one of the busiest transportation links in the Northeast corridor, carrying millions of vehicles each year and the PATCO commuter rail lines between two major economic centers.
What makes the bridge remarkable isn’t that it has lasted a century. It’s that a structure designed for the America of the 1920s continues to carry the weight of the America of 2026.
Today’s transportation demands bear little resemblance to those of a century ago. Traffic volumes are higher. Trucks are heavier. Shipping activity is more complex. Public expectations around safety and reliability are far greater than the engineers of 1926 could have anticipated.
Yet the bridge continues to safely serve modern transportation demands — not because infrastructure that lasts remains unchanged, but because it evolves. A bridge does not reach 100 years of service by accident. Longevity requires continuous inspection, preservation, rehabilitation, and modernization over generations. It also requires something that often gets overlooked in public conversations about infrastructure: stewardship.
Every phase of that stewardship depends on the people responsible for building, maintaining, and rehabilitating infrastructure. While design may establish a structure’s foundation, construction quality, material selection, execution, and ongoing rehabilitation often determine how successfully it performs decades later.
Across the U.S., transportation systems built during earlier periods of industrial and economic expansion continue to support modern mobility. Most Americans rely on infrastructure built decades ago without thinking twice about it. The reason they can is that generations of engineers, inspectors, transportation agencies, and contractors have kept those systems functioning behind the scenes, often with limited funding and growing performance demands.