Template:National Bridge Inventory/doc

NBI is a template that simplifies and better organizes reference calls to the Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) National Bridge Inventory (NBI), an annually published data set on all bridges at least 20 feet (6.1 m) in length in the United States. This data includes the coordinates of the bridge, bridge type, when the bridge was built and/or reconstructed, length of the bridge, vertical and horizontal navigation clearances, and sufficiency ratings. This template links to a particular bridge's structure page at nationalbridges.com, which provides a convenient search mechanism for finding a particular bridge.

NOTE: The links to the specific structure pages have been disabled because the website database changed, resulting in links going to the wrong page almost universally.

Usage

{{NBI |structurenumber= |datakey= |linkwork= |linkpub= |access-date=}}

This template has two required parameters:

• structurenumber: The structure number of the bridge. These structure numbers are assigned at the state level, so there is no single pattern for this number except for it being a maximum of 15 characters. This number is necessary in case the source website disappears.
• datakey: The datakey of the bridge within the nationalbridges.com database. This number, which has between four and six digits, is found in the URL of each individual entry, specifically in the lqm_id parameter of the URL. This key is necessary because there is no relationship between this number and the structure number.

The template also has three optional parameters:

• linkwork: Provides a wikilink to National Bridge Inventory when set to yes
• linkpub: Provides a wikilink to Federal Highway Administration when set to yes
• access-date: Date the entry was accessed. The date may be in any format.