The crisis of U.S. infrastructure, II

unattended and the volunteerism in decline because of congestion. “It shouldn’t be a fact of life,” he said. The economic impact of the bottlenecks has been “woefully understudied,” according to Robert Puentes, an expert in infrastructure at the Brookings Institution, who regards transportation policy as “a fact-free zone.” Clifford Winston, an economist at Brookings, has tried. His calculation of the annual economic cost of congestion is just a third of the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) — $15 billion in air traffic and nearly $50 billion on the roads, counting the shipping delays, the higher inventories required, the wasted fuel, the value of gridlocked motorists’ time, and other not-quite-tangible factors. The impediments are numerous, Winston said, but “none of them are big. That’s why they persist.” The problem of congestion is, to a degree, self-limiting. It could injure the economy of a gridlocked metropolis, but by no more than 5 to 10 percent, according to Small, by driving business to the suburbs, exurbs, and smaller cities that stand to benefit from the big cities’ pain. Nor has congestion in the air been neglected. The air traffic system, in which 25 percent of last year’s flights arrived late, has added runways in recent years in Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and St. Louis; starting this November it will add another runway at Chicago’s O’Hare. The $13 billion that the FAA spends annually on infrastructure development for civil aviation falls a mere $1 billion short — pocket change, really — of what GAO analyst Dillingham believes it should spend. The next generation of air traffic control, based on a global positioning system instead of on radar, has been delayed — not because of the immense cost or the technology, Dillingham said, but because of the difficulty of integrating it into the existing system.

Solomon writes that scarier, perhaps, for the U.S. economic future is the possibility that congestion or other strains on an elderly infrastructure will damage America’s already shaky competitive position in global markets. The American business executives who leave South Korea’s luxurious Incheon International Airport or Shanghai’s modern, half-empty airport to arrive at New York’s seedy JFK are bound to feel repulsed. Today, that is nothing more than inconvenience, but eventually, economists say, it could count. “In a globalized economy,” the New America Foundation’s Schwenninger said, “there are only a few ways you can compete.” Asian countries can claim lower wage rates and taxes, and Europe boasts governmental subsidies and an educated workforce. This leaves infrastructure, Schwenninger ventured, as American businesses’ best hope for a competitive edge — more so than 20 to 30 years ago, and more important than education. Silicon Valley, he reported, has lost some of its silicon-wafer manufacturing to Texas and countries overseas because producers fear brownouts in California. Yet the threat to U.S. competitiveness should not be exaggerated, for other countries face similar problems with congestion. Gaining permission to build a new road or runway is even harder in cramped, environmentally conscious Europe. China and India are spending 9 percent and 5 percent, respectively, of their gross domestic product on infrastructure. The United States, however, has an overwhelming advantage: Its elaborate infrastructure — 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 — is already built.

Tomorrow: The cost of maintaining U.S. infrastructure