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Show CONSTRUCTION COSTS RISING It now costs three dollars dol-lars and ninety six cents to build the same amount of highway that one dollar would have purchased in 1967. This grim news was revealed to the Utah Department De-partment of Transportation recently. The biggest increase has been in bitumen, the' pet-r pet-r oleum based material used to make asphalt. Bitumen Bi-tumen has jumped 496 since the base years. The cost of bituminous surfacing surfac-ing is up 341 and the cost of roadway excavation has jumped 226. The cost to build bridges and overpasses overpas-ses has also skyrocketed. Structural steel is up 333. reinforcing steel has climbed 219 and the cost of concrete for structures is up 212. The cost of asphalt for maintenance has risen 50 since last year. Inflated Inflat-ed steel prices have driven up guardrail replacement and sign Installation cost. Increased equipment and fuel costs has inflated the price of gravel, a vital element ele-ment of all road maintenance mainten-ance and construction. The continued increase of oil and steel prices has caused our quarterly index in-dex to spiral upward. These inflated costs have pushed roadbuilders into a fiscal squeeze play . . . and there is no relief in sight. UDOT's revenues have already dropped 15ni below budget projections and 77( below last years revenues. Local governments govern-ments are caught in the same bind and several will be hard pressed to do much more than patch chuck-holes chuck-holes until construction costs moderate. |