The other ledger for Pennsylvania: half its major roads worn out, a $24.3 billion drinking-water need, 788 high-hazard dams, a 262,753-home deficit for its poorest renters, and a grid being re-planned around data centres — in the state that still makes and moves much of the East. Every figure is sourced, dated, and labeled — counted, modeled, or assessed.
How to read this page: the class chip on every measure is the honesty label. Counted = an inspection or enumeration record. Modeled = a study's projection or risk score — printed with the modeler's name. Assessed = a structured survey of required investment — needs as documented, not measurements of decay. Figures keep the form their source gave them; years are printed on every measure.
Click any category to expand it — every measure with its figure, what it means in plain language, and its source.
Nine categories, 19 measures. Pennsylvania's needs ledger is an old-industrial-state ledger: the nation's fifth-largest population running some of its oldest roads, bridges, pipes and dams — 51% of major roads poor or mediocre, a $24.3B drinking-water need, 788 high-hazard dams — alongside a quarter-million-home deficit for its poorest renters and a power grid being re-planned around data centres.
Where sources disagree, both are printed and neither is averaged away. Hospitals is the clearest case: CHQPR's reserve-based screen counts 17 Pennsylvania rural hospitals at risk (9 immediate), while Chartis's vulnerability model puts the state in a 10–15% band — different instruments, printed apart. Dams is handled the same way: the federal inventory counts 788 high-hazard dams and the state regulator counts 741, on different universes, and no poor-condition count is printed because the only published share blends poor condition with unrated and withheld assessments. Broadband prints both the $1.16B original BEAD allocation and the $711M the restructured programme actually approved.
Several figures are news-flagged — official numbers (EPA, ASCE Pennsylvania, the PUC's consultants, the Broadband Development Authority, DEP) carried by trade and business press in the sources reviewed — and each measure names the underlying official source. Metro and regional figures are labelled as what they are: the traffic numbers are TTI's for the Philadelphia (four-state) and Harrisburg urban areas, and the headline power number is PJM's 13-state projection, printed because Pennsylvania's grid is PJM's grid. No statewide congestion total and no USDA food-desert tract count is published in the sources reviewed, and none is printed.