Peter Orszag says that I'm wrong about America's bridges: we really need to increase funding to repair and rebuild them if we want them to remain in decent shape. His strongest argument is that instead of looking at the past, we need to look at the future:
Consider the age of American bridges. Not surprisingly, bridge quality tends to diminish as a bridge ages, especially toward the end of its useful life. Today, the average bridge in the U.S. was built in 1975, making the average age 45 years. In 1992, the average age of a bridge was 34 years. And today a quarter of bridges are 60 years old, up from 15 percent in 1992. As the bridges grow older and a larger share of them approach the end of their useful lives, it will cost more to maintain or replace them than a backward-looking indicator would suggest. Without investment beyond current levels, bridge quality will decline.
I'll buy that.¹ I'm not actually opposed to spending more on roads and bridges, and I've long favored an increase in the gasoline tax to fund exactly that. So we're not that far apart, especially since President Biden's infrastructure plan includes only $115 billion for roads and bridges. That's $11 billion per year, which is hardly a king's ransom.
For what it's worth, my main gripe is really with the overall conventional wisdom that US infrastructure is falling to pieces. Some of this comes from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which is naturally in favor of lobbying for more civil engineering projects and tells us on an annual basis that our infrastructure is crumbling. I don't hold that against them, but I am perpetually surprised that their lobbying is accepted so credulously as some kind of unbiased assessment.
Beyond that, I suspect that our New York-centric national media plays a role here too. If you live in New York City, with its potholes and train failures and traffic jams and century-old water tunnels, infrastructure porn is probably a pretty easy sell. Outside of New York, however, things are not nearly so bad.
I suppose this is yet another example of my view that most things are not as bad as we're often led to believe. But I hold this view only because it's true. There are things that are getting worse, but for the most part we are victims of politicians who get more votes if they scare people and media folks who get more clicks if they scare people.³ This is why I'm instantly on red alert every time I read a story (or listen to a politician) telling us how bad something is without also telling us how it compares to previous years and/or other countries. That comparison is everything.
¹In fact, if you want a good example of this, just take a look at Italy. They built a ton of bridges right after World War II and most of them were designed for a 50 service life.² Everything was hunky-dory through the aughts, but Italy hadn't maintained their bridges very well and then, just when the need was greatest, was unable to maintain them thanks to the Great Recession. The result is that a bridge system which had a pretty enviable record from 1950-2000 suddenly began killing people in large numbers.
²It's worth noting that this is for everyday bridges, the kind that are workhorses of daily commutes but that no one notices. The big, impressive bridges that cross scenic gorges and end up on postcards are generally designed to last much longer.
³Plus, of course, the usual problem that "Bridges Continue Not to Collapse" isn't much of a news story. If a bridge collapses, it's news. If a bridge stays intact, then it's just a bridge.
Subject to local variation as you point out.
Currently in my midwestern town they are on year 4 of a project supposed to be finished in 2 years and they are talking about extending working hours to get it done before 2022.
How much of the World Economic Forum survey is based on expectations versus reality, though. Having traveled fairly extensively in Germany, I can say that their roads are vastly superior to the US and yet they rank lower. Germans expect great roads whereas US citizens expect pretty mediocre roads and they answer the survey accordingly. That sort of thing.
Bridges in the former East Germany are a disaster, so that may be where the results are coming from.
I bet the Neonazis in the former DDR blame Nigerian immigrants, though.
I took a closer look at the methods used for this survey a while back (also being surprised to see Germany ranked lower) and from what I could tell, it's almost totally based upon subjective self-reporting of one's own and visited countries rather than any quantifiable, objective criteria.
Okay, you're not allowed to have a footnote with a footnote. That risks getting into
the infinite regress of "footnotes all the way down," and nobody wants that.
Kevin in perhaps his most annoying mode: the Panglossian contrarian.
Doesn't he understand how fashionable cynicism is??
Maybe I have definitions wrong but when I think of "infrastructure" I think of, yeah, road and bridge maintenance, but also things like public transportation, internet, and power and water. Our internet is middling in most of the country and pretty poor in a lot of rural areas, and overpriced by corporate ownership. Public transportation on a local level is pretty spotty depending on what city you're in and virtually useless nationally. The power grids in California and Texas are halfway to third-world status and prone to failure (thanks to corporate greed in both cases and "yee-haw libertarianism" in the latter).
In those respects I guess we could consider infrastructure "pretty good" compared to, say, living in the middle of the Sahara or on top of a mountain in the Himalayas, but for being in "The Greatest Country In The World™" it seems like we should be able to demand much better?
@cooner
Agreed! I was out chanting "USA! USA!" the other day, and I stepped in a pothole and twisted my ankle. O'course, I then got the finest medical care in the whole wide world, so that's something.
don't forget the lawyer!
OK, I get why you might be suspicious of the American Society of Civil Engineers survey, but why do you give any credence to the World Economic Forum survey? Who are they? What was their methodology?
Isn't that literally the Davos-folk?
"There are things that are getting worse, but for the most part we are victims of politicians who get more votes if they scare people and media folks who get more clicks if they scare people"
I like blaming politicians and media as much as anyone, but the primary fault is our citizens who like to engage in hysterical over-exaggeration based on
- some (unvalidated) theory of how the world works
- a compulsion to fit everything into that theory
- a zealotry to spread the theory far and wide
At no point is actual empirical validation against the claims being made ever performed...
The comment just above me is a perfect example of the species.
I think it was Yglesias who pointed out that a lot of the infrastructure build boosting is rtelated to specifically boosting demand in the construction sector.
He argues that a lot of the roads and bridges stuff in the Biden infrastructure plan is arguably just a carryover from the discussion in 2008 when the country was recovering from a huge housing bubble and a ton of construction workers are out of a job and needed direct subsidy.
And those projects are why we are not in desperate shape right now.
There is a massive housing boom going on so...
Road/bridge quality as a stand-in for all infrastructure is not a good way to look at this.
The ASCE (as awful as they are about development/building in general, being generally pro-build-everything) is correct that our infrastructure is crumbling/is expensive and we need to repair it, but they're not actually really talking about roads and bridges. Those are just the most visible parts, and also the easiest to spend money on.
We've overbuilt our infrastructure, largely due to the suburban car-centric development pattern that we adopted whole-hog, without precedent and without looking back, after WW2. That isn't just roads.
It's water mains. Electric service. Sewage. Stormwater runoff. Sidewalks. Street trees. Traffic signals. Crosswalks.
All of these other things that are so much more influential on quality of life than whether your road has a pothole in it, and they're all devolved to more local levels for maintenance/repair (generally speaking) - which are precisely the governments that are most likely to be unable to afford it.
This is the problem with the way infrastructure is reported on. It's just reported on as if it's a monolithic topic, and that we just need to spend more money on more roads and stuff. But what happens when it's framed in that way is we end up with bigger, stupider roads that just end up costing even more to maintain in the future, instead of building intelligently and with an eye to the future.
We're lucky that we can afford to waste the money, I guess, but it's still a stupid way of doing things. And it leads to really shitty experiences, like all of the traffic from 10 cul-de-sacs being funneled to feeder roads and then to an "arterial road", which then becomes a congested nightmare because traffic from 100 cul-de-sacs are all trying to pass through or reach the same 4 shopping centers with oceanic parking lots for the same 20 national chain/big box stores. It's all tied up together, poor design and exorbitant/unnecessary cost, and in service of centralized monopolies.
This is America.
I don't understand this point. Are you claiming that in other countries, traffic ISN'T funneled into progressively "bigger" roads that become congested as a result?
Don't worry, CA will still get their bullet train.
😉
LOL. Looking forward to zipping from Turlock to Fresno.
This is sort of tangential but Kevin sort of opened the door for a hobby horse of mine: gas tax for (road) infrastructure.
Even if we are talking only about roadways (bridges included) I am pretty adamantly against a gas tax to subsidize it. I know the easy answer is, well it's people with cars who use the roads, and the cars use gas, so seems logical.
Except on second look not. Here are some of the reasons why:
The economically disadvantaged will end up suffering financially from this tax far more than than those who are better off.
1. With the exception of a few big cities, we have piss-poor public transport in the US. For many of the poor, this means no alternative to cars.
2. If you are poor, you cannot afford to buy a newer, gas efficient car but are often stuck with a gas guzzler because you just can't manage the upfront costs. So, you buy proportionally more gas to cover the same distance.
3. If you are poor, you often live further away from your job -- meaning a longer commute because you cannot afford to live in the suburbs where the McMansions that you clean are located. This means point #2 above is exacerbated -- more miles, with less miles per gallon.
4. If you have more money, you can afford to buy a hybrid or a plug-in, meaning gas tax, so what? If you're rich enough to drive a Tesla, you will pay zilch toward the roads and bridges that you use.
No matter how you cut it, a gas tax is incredibly bad news for the folks who are living hand to mouth. So, no, there has to be a better way.
Kevin, I am sure you can organize this better than I, and I am sure you would be able to come up with good numbers to back it up -- just wanted to throw that out there for you to think about. Maybe you can come up with a better alternative than a gas tax.
A gas tax discourages the use of gas. That is sufficient justification for steadily increasing fuel taxes.
The various problems you cite characterize consumption taxes in general, and yet all (every single one!) of the high income social democracies tax consumption much more heavily than the United States does. The solution to the challenge lies in taking a wholistic approach: look at the tax and transfer system as a whole, and structure the system (again, in its entirety) to helps those who need help, and produce an overall just and livable society. The United States, for the most part, hasn't done this yet.
Slashing or eliminating gasoline taxes in isolation is just going to mean more potholes, pollution and traffic congestion
Re: #2.
There are tons of used Hondas and Toyotas that get excellent gas mileage, available for decent prices. They may cost a bit more than an old gas guzzler (or not), but the initial difference will soon be made up for by lower maintenance costs, lower fuel costs, lower registration fees (if according to gross vehicle weight), etc. Hell, my wife and I have a used Toyota and a used Nissan that were far cheaper than most of the cars on the lot, they we've got six years out of each of them so far, and the mileage remains great. The worst gas guzzlers are pickup trucks and SUVs, and there is no way they cost less than fuel-efficient passenger cars. And, of course, Americans already pay LESS for gas than almost any other country's drivers.
You know who buys a lot of gas? Long-haul truckers. Their vehicles cause by far the most wear and tear on roads, and absolutely should be paying the most for their maintenance. Gasoline tax is an excellent way to collect that. If you have a better alternative, go ahead and offer one up.
[Tim Pawlenty intensifies.]
I can't comment on roads and bridges, but I can comment on water infrastructure. My brother ran a Corps of Engineers regional office (and worked at two others), and he says dams, dikes and levees are generally in very bad condition. Some of them were built badly in the first place, and simply allowed to go from bad to worse, year after year after year. We all saw failures in NOLA after Hurricane Katrina, but that was only the most obvious and spectacular example. Sacramento, CA is basically supported by dikes and levees that were hand-built by farmers more than a century ago, and they leak constantly, because of that (and river flooding), there are sections of the city where you can build residential property, but no large business properties. The lower Mississippi is full of similar problems (or worse), as are large waterways in the industrial Midwest.
I run a private lakes community, and dams like ours are failing left and right across Virginia, and stricter regulations and less funding make it very hard for neighborhoods to repair and maintain them. So they just become wetlands and property value is lost.
I am just completing a 6000+ mile road trip, from our home in Maryland to visit our new granddaughter in California and back. I can testify that at least the interstate highway system is in pretty terrible shape. Lots of potholes. Many, many poorly executed repairs of potholes and expansion joints and crumbling pavement. I'd guess about 30-40% of the miles were in serious need of rebuilding. There were a few construction projects, but not nearly enough to keep up with the ongoing deterioration, and not at all targeted at thee worst highway sections.
'I've long favored an increase in the gasoline tax to fund exactly that. '
That, of course, is a completely outdated way of funding road maintenance, and was never particularity great in the first place (because even people that don't drive much benefit heavily from interstates, for example).
It's so outdated, that the brain-dead GOP has actually de-incentivized cleaner vehicles to try and wring money out of those drivers. MORONIC.
You can tell a nation's future by how well it invests in it. America is in decline, thanks to Conservatives.
If Biden and the Democrats can turn that around, in the face of epic levels of obstruction and corruption and foreign sabotage, it will be the greatest turnaround since WWII saved our economy and built the greatest industrial powerhouse in history.