AnalysisThe crisis of U.S. infrastructure, II
The U.S. infrastructure is elaborate — 4 million miles of roads, 600,000 bridges, 26,000 miles of commercially navigable waterways, 11,000 miles of transit lines, 500 train stations, 300 ports, 19,000 airports, 55,000 community drinking water systems, and 30,000 wastewater plants; maintaining this infrastructure costs money
Last week we brought the first part of the analysis by National Journal’s Burt Solomon of the crisis of U.S. infrastructure. In today’s segment we use his analysis to assess the scope of the problems U.S. infrastructure — and, as a result, the U.S. economy — face. Tomorrow, in the third and last installment, we will discuss the cost of maintaining the U.S. infrastructure.
Solomon writes that occasionally a civilization makes its infrastructure an emblem of its ambition or greatness. Consider, for example, the marvels of ancient Rome — its roads, aqueducts, public baths and lavatories, its Colosseum and other sites of public entertainment. Conceived as a military necessity to assure the movement of troops through a far-flung empire, Rome’s extravagant and enduring infrastructure took on other functions, too. As a public benefaction, it gave the state a way to justify its own existence, according to Garrett Fagan, a historian at Pennsylvania State University, and the many amenities that wealthy families financed served as “a kind of social compact between the upper classes and the poorer classes.” The boldness and breadth of Roman infrastructure, Fagan said, “go a long way to explain why the empire lasted so long.” The United States has often shown a similar ambition. In 1808, after Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase added a vast wilderness that stretched as far as the future Montana, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin proposed a national transportation network of roads, rivers, and ports. In the following decades, Henry Clay of Kentucky lent his legislative weight in the House, and then in the Senate, to the “internal improvements” of canals and railroads. Abraham Lincoln, even as he struggled to win the Civil War, pursued plans for a transcontinental railroad. Theodore Roosevelt, so fond of proclaiming the needs of “future generations,” convened a conference of governors that resulted in water projects that irrigated the west and generated electricity cheaply; his list of ventures-still-undone gave TR’s fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a starting point when he tried to spend the nation out of the Great Depression. Then, in the postwar boom of the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower pressed for a system of interstate highways which knitted the nation together and bolstered its economy. As late as the 1970s, after the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire in 1969, the federal government invested tens of billions of dollars in sewer systems and wastewater treatment plants.
Taxpayers’ generosity toward
