Safety Inspection of In-Service Bridges Practice Test

The weight of the bridge structure itself is a fixed, permanent load that the supports must carry at all times. This is called the dead load. It includes the weight of all structural elements—beams, girders, deck, rails, and fixed utilities—since these parts don’t move or change over time.

Live loads, on the other hand, come from things that can vary, like vehicles and pedestrians, and are used to represent the loads that the bridge will experience during use. Some design standards may further split live loads into primary and secondary categories, but those are still variable, not permanent, loads. Therefore the structural weight itself is not a live load; it is a dead load.