Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the outermost highway crossing of Baltimore’s harbor and a 48-year-old landmark carrying Interstate 695 traffic between Dundalk and Baltimore’s Hawkins Point. The bridge’s main truss section fell into the Patapsco River shipping channel after the main supporting pier was struck by the Dali container ship which had suddenly lost power and control. The disaster proved both swift and terrible with six lives lost, all members of an overnight maintenance crew, along with billions of dollars in economic losses as the Port of Baltimore and other businesses struggled with the loss of that vital span.

A lot of questions have been raised since that fateful day — about transportation planning, about shipping standards and bridge safety and particularly about how a 984-foot-long cargo ship that had suffered a power outage as recently as the day before the crash had not been operated with greater care. Yet, oddly, the National Transportation Safety Board last week focused mainly on just one element, bridge safety, with a report highly critical of the Maryland Transportation Authority’s failure to conduct a vulnerability assessment on the Key Bridge. Such an assessment, NTSB Chair Jennifer L. Homendy pointed out, could have allowed the MDTA to safeguard against such a collision.

That last criticism raised some hackles with Gov. Wes Moore and understandably so. First, because directing the regulatory agency’s attention exclusively to bridge owners — the NTSB expressed similar concerns about 68 other bridges built prior to a 1991 update to safety standards — deflects attention from how the fault for the crash rests chiefly with the Dali’s crew and owners (or, as Gov. Moore has described them, the “reckless operators”). But also because it implies that there have been plenty of tax dollars to shore up any span that might fail to meet those specifications. Attention: State transportation funding has been strained for years. There continues to be a serious debate over how finite transportation resources can be used most effectively.

And that is the heart of the dilemma. Let’s be clear: Maryland and other states need to approach bridge safety with the utmost care. The Key Bridge surely demonstrated that. And taking appropriate steps to further protect the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, for example, is a worthy task. But with all due respect to Chair Homendy, most transportation-related deaths aren’t caused by container ship strikes. They are far and away most often a product of motor vehicle crashes that collectively take more than 40,000 lives annually in this country.

So if you are in charge of transportation funding and you must choose between capital projects that might protect drivers — through better traffic control at intersections or installing safety barriers to name just two examples — and installing costly protections to a shipping channel pier that has never been a problem before, which do you choose?

Again, that’s not to give anyone at MDOT or in the governor’s office a free pass. It’s notable that container ships are getting bigger and so the risk has been rising. A generation ago, the largest shipping vessel was less than half the size of today’s largest. The first real container ship had a capacity of 800 20-foot-long shipping containers in 1956; the Dali could carry 10,000 and there are some today with the capacity of 24,000 Twenty-foot Equivalent Units or TEUs as they are called.

Clearly, there is a heightened risk as such vessels evolve from merely large ships to floating behemoths. Shouldn’t the folks who profit from this race to build and operate the biggest be required to pay for the consequences of this choice? Don’t we expect tractor-trailer operators to be assessed for the damage their heavy loads can do to our highways? And, by the way, we certainly restrict truck size for safety reasons.

So, as we pause this day to remember the lives lost on March 26, 2024, and look toward the development of a $2 billion replacement bridge that is expected to be completed in the fall of 2028, let us also keep in mind that governments are not omniscient and disasters happen. The eternal question is, are those given the responsibility of making our transportation systems safe properly vigilant and adequately funded? One crash isn’t the best measure, but what actions the MDTA, the governor, the state legislature, federal authorities and others take from this day forward will best answer that.