Infrastructure

In the early 1980s, when I worked for the National League of Cities,
we heard regularly that too little was being done to replace and modernize urban infrastructure -- roads, bridge, water systems, public transit, etc.  Thirty years later we hear pretty much the same thing.  Is this a continuing theme from the collective infrastructure lobby or is it a real problem that's getting worse?  My guess is that there's at least some truth to the former suspicion.  But my every-day experience with traffic, with electrical power failures, and with breakdowns on the Washington subway system tells me the infrastructure problem is real.

And William Galston, at Brookings, has gathered several recent reports that back this up.  He cites one with comparative country-by-country rankings showing that the U.S. ranks "18th in railroads, 19th in ports, 20th in roads, 30th in airports, and 33rd in the quality of our electrical system."  For a country claiming to be the world's leading economic power this is not good.

I'd like to think that federal, state, and local levels of government, all of them with public support, would be responding.  How can businesses operate efficiently and compete in world markets if things like deteriorating utilities and transportation systems keep raising costs?  Galston cites one report estimating that "in 2010, Americans spent a total of 4.8 billion hours stuck in traffic, wasting 1.9 billion gallons of fuel, at a total cost of $101 billion."   And from what I can tell these reports don't even include the challenges of adapting to changing climatic conditions, the kinds of massive infrastructure projects now being talked about to protect cities along coastal areas.

But at every levels of government here there's a political party dug in and insisting forever that the public sector should be shrinking, not getting larger; that taxes and public spending should be always lower.  I can only hope that some of the progressive winds apparently bringing changes in other policy areas can have an effect here, too.