Too Big To Fail: America's Failing Infrastructure

American infrastructure is aging, fast. Roads and bridges are failing, entire sections of the US and Canada have had lost power, effecting approximately 55,000,000 people, due to lack of tree maintenance, and many of the sewer and water lines in cities like New York are over 100 years old (Markowitz; Minkel). According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2013, the United States infrastructure network earns a grade of a D+, and requires a $3.6 trillion dollar investment by the year 2020 to make the grade (American Society of Civil Engineers).

Infrastructure is a key part of modern life; we use it every day without thinking about it, and because of this, it goes neglected. Most people only think about the road that they are driving on when they hit a pothole; infrastructure is invisible, until it breaks. The fact that infrastructure is largely invisible means it gets neglected and abused, it is not an issue most people think about, politicians do not win by talking about it, and any solution in the near term generally requires raising taxes, making the subject more unpopular for the citizenship at large. The longer we ignore our infrastructure problems, the more it will cost to fix, and the more likely it is for a disaster to happen.

One of

the major points of contention is the cost of completing projects and how to pay for them. The upkeep of the US highway system is largely supported by the National Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by the national gasoline and diesel taxes. The fund is reaching insolvency and expected to be running at a deficit by the end of August of this year (United States Department of Transportation). The fund has run out of money before, and been saved by short-term resolutions from Congress, to keep the fund funded to the next fiscal year. The reason for this is the federal gas tax is capped at a fixed rate of 18.4 cents per gallon of gas, and 23.4 cents per gallon of diesel. The real value of the tax has dropped 36% due to inflation, and increased fuel economy has reduced the amount of fuel spent per mile driven, increasing wear on roads while tax revenues decrease (Pomerleau).
America’s transportation infrastructure has been a key component to our nation’s economic growth. Millions of tons of cargo move around the country on our roads and bridges and through our waterways and ports each day, without proper attention the expensive problem we have now will become exponentially more so as parts begin to fail. Of our nation’s approximately 607,000 bridges one in ten is considered structurally deficient according to the ASCE study, with an additional 14 percent being considered “functionally obsolete,” safe for now (Golson).
In Barry LePatner’s book Too Big to Fail: America's Failing Infrastructure, he speaks about the 2007 collapse of the I-35 West bridge in Minnesota over the Mississippi River.

He details a long history of ill repair and modifications with the latest modification to the bridge, before it’s collapse taking place in 1997, but still leaving it inadequate to support it’s ever increasing load. From 1967 to 1997 the daily traffic load on the bridge nearly tripled, from 60,000 vehicles per day, to approximately 160,000 per day at the time of it’s collapse. The increased traffic load, along with the increased weight from subsequent modifications, outpaced the bridge’s structural design (LePatner,

6).
This is how infrastructure improvement has been being handled in this country for far too long. The hodgepodge of modifications and interim solutions is putting both drivers and our economy at risk. Following the collapse I-35W, the federal government gave the state of Minnesota $250 million dollars to build a new bridge (LePatner, xxi). This does not account for the interruption of trucking routes, or the cleanup operations, let alone the thirteen lives lost. This bridge collapse is an extreme but valid, and repeatable example of why we as a nation need to take a different view of our ailing infrastructure.
Roads are not the only infrastructure that is in need of overhaul, inland waterways, which transport more than 51 million truckloads of goods around our country need, work too. According to Jordan Golson’s report for Wired.com, referencing the ASCE report, many of the lochs that control the movement of the shipping barges are over 50 years old, prompting the barge operators to support an increase their taxes to modernize. From the same article, the Army Corps of Engineers estimates a cost of $13 billion dollars to complete such a project by 2020, the date referenced in the ASCE report. However with their current funding they will not be able to complete the project until the year 2090 (Golson).
So why the collective blind eye from government at all levels? Infrastructure is a necessity that goes largely ignored, because until a bridge collapses nobody is paying attention to it. Politicians would rather focus on the hot button issues, the ones they talk about on the campaign trail, and sling mud at each other in television commercials about. The federal deficit, health care, international policy, and moral issues win elections, nobody cares about infrastructure because it is are already there, running, and rotting silently in the background.
On the local and state level, many of these projects are far beyond most budgets. States regularly dispute having to pay for the full cost of maintaining their highways, as the federal government should be paying for the majority of the maintenance of interstates and highways key to interstate trade, and transportation of goods. But politicians don’t like to talk about infrastructure, because as necessary to daily life and economic health as it may be, it is painfully boring to hear about. And to increase their trepidation, raising taxes, and erecting traffic cones do nothing but get their constituency groaning, no matter how important it is.
Roads, bridges, and waterways are just the tip of the iceberg. The utility infrastructures in major cities, are aging as well, and failing on a regular basis. Notably, in 2014 a 93 year old water main on the UCLA campus burst, at a juncture with a 58 year old line flooding the campus with approximately 20 million gallons of water, according to CNN.com (Hanna). The city of Los Angeles’ aging utilities have caused major problems over the last several years, in 2009 there were 101 major water line breaks, according to the LA Times (Gordan and Reyes).
But the Los Angelino water mains are nothing compared to the New York City sewer system. Parts of the 6,600 miles pipe date back to the 1850s and are still use, and in far from flawless condition. Every year the New York City sewer system overflows an estimated 40 billion gallons of wastewater, requiring an estimated $2 billion dollars a year in clean up costs, according to an article by Michael Markowitz for the Gotham Gazette, quoting an estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency (Markowitz).
So what is the solution? There is always raising taxes, but that is not a popular answer. In the case of roads, that are funded gas taxes it is not the most viable solution in the long term either, with the federal mandate for more fuel efficient vehicles. The solution to this being a federal road use tax, but if raising an existing tax is unpopular, making a new one is even worse. Re-appropriating budgetary requirements is another solution, one that can easily be implemented by putting the money we already expect to use to refill the underfunded trust coffers to complete that years work. Which only really gets us to the point of maintaining the status quo.
To really affect change there needs to be a push to open the dialogue. The current climate in Washington is often stalemated, letting key issues sit on the table as minutiae is argued about, and riders are attached to unrelated bills just to make things more convoluted and further muck up the works. Not to undersell how complicated and costly the solution is, but something must be done at all levels of government to maintain, and protect not only our infrastructure but the economy it rides on. Unfortunately there is the hurdle of getting a meaningful, and lasting dialogue about infrastructure to happen at all, potholes and road work rarely wins votes, and that is all the American public will think about, and Congress knows that.
The longer we ignore our infrastructure, the higher the cost will be. If America doesn’t get serious about fixing our infrastructure, when problems arise and bridges fail our economy will suffer, and people will get hurt. Our own infrastructure is a crisis lurking in the shadows, with the potential to bring down our economy, and solidify some of the world’s view of America as an ailing industrial power sliding evermore steadily toward a cliff. I hope it doesn’t take a catastrophic event to bring attention to the issues, because then it will be too late.