Stacked bar chart: 100 Year Lifecycle Investment Requirements

My organization has tasked me with coping a specific stacked bar chart (someone stumbled upon it on the web) in order to visually display information about 100 Year Lifecycle Investment Requirements.

The chart looks like this (it can also be found on page '"v" of this document):

enter image description here

I'm not a data visualization expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I find myself being awfully critical of this stacked bar chart. Mainly, I find it incredibly difficult to glean meaning from it.

The chart is attempting to communicate several stacked values over time:

  • Maintenance
  • Renewal/Rehabilitation
  • Replacement Expansion
  • Disposal
  • Non-Infrastructure
  • Backlog

But if you asked me to describe what the data actually means, I'd say: "well, I dunno, things seem to be going up over time". But other than that, even with the statistics in the top left corner, it doesn't seem to tell a simple enough story.

Given the subject matter, is a stacked bar chart the best way to display the data? Or are there other industry standards/options that might be suitable alternatives?

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