In Praise of the Big Dig

Last week in this newspaper I suggested that an appropriate response to Sept. 11 would be a massive development program for the Middle East designed to prop up our ally regimes and strengthen civil society in the region. This week I’d like to suggest a similar domestic program that is not in response to the terrorist attack but is informed by it. Fighting with its gloves off, our government is in the rare and enviable position of ignoring such polite fictions as the Social Security “lockbox” and the desirability of running the country at a budget surplus. Now is the time, when the economy is cooling off and Americans are unusually accepting of interferences to their normal routines, to rebuild the infrastructure of this country from the ground up.

Stop and take a look around the next time you travel through your hometown. I’d bet good money that the entire civil infrastructure of your city—roads, airports, train stations, dams, aqueducts, reservoirs, courthouses, schools, hospitals, electrical transmission lines, garbage dumps, sewer treatment plants—was built before 1960, with the vast majority built in the 1930s. To take just one local example, according to Massport, Logan Airport was built in 1923 and expanded to its current four-runway configuration in the 50s. Since then there have been many improvements to the airport, but most involve access to the airport and its terminals, not runway construction, which is the primary limiting factor of airport traffic. Unfortunately, the situation is similar around the country for many types of infrastructure; our country, largely, was built in the 1930s as a result of the New Deal. About the only area of growth in government investment has been in maximum security prisons.

Then think about what Boston is doing with the Big Dig. Virtually alone among major cities in the U.S., Boston has realized the futility of incremental improvements to its transportation infrastructure. Instead of adding a lane here and a new on-ramp there, Boston is completely scrapping and rebuilding its infrastructure, putting vast new roads underground and building new bridges and tunnels as well. The community paid for the multibillion dollar project using public funds from the state, local and federal levels and had to overcome a lot of not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) opposition to get it done. The result, when completed, will be an infrastructure that provides ease of access and quality of life benefits unmatched by any city of Boston’s size and age in the country.

The rest of the country is faced by an urgent imperative to think on the scale of Boston’s Big Dig: population growth. In 1940, around the time of the great construction boom of the Roosevelt era, the U.S. population was 132 million, according to the Census Bureau. In 1956, when the last big infrastructure project—the Interstate Highway System—was proposed, the population was 168 million. Today, there are 285 million Americans, twice as many as our infrastructure was built to handle.

Since then, we have made incremental improvements, but anyone who has tried to catch an airplane in Atlanta—or use electricity in California, or drive on a highway anywhere—knows, we have not invested enough. The slowing economy has taken some strain off of the nation’s physical plant, but before the stock market crash it had been stretched to its breaking point.

Now is a good time to take a hard look at fixing our problems—not only because we can ignore calls for a balanced budget for the time being, but also because, in an economic slowdown, the government can provide direct stimulus by engaging in building projects. Now is the time because Americans have been knocked out of their complacency and greed into a fit of patriotism and sacrifice and are less likely to engage in irritating and detrimental NIMBYism. While Americans are certainly not naive enough to believe that building a new garbage dump will help win the war on terrorism, the country is nevertheless in a new state of mind right now, and if the money were allocated, the government would likely find it a lot easier to navigate through the webs of regulation and red tape that hinder and delay new government projects.

Ideally, we would use our newfound solidarity to mobilize the country when we turn back to domestic issues unrelated to the attacks in a few months. However, the likelihood that our government will take any action to halt the decay of our infrastructure and provide for future economic potential is slim. When growth begins again in this country, sometime in the next few years, we’ll see how well our aging infrastructure handles it. Eventually, resources that need to be rebuilt or expanded will be, but if we don’t do anything now, we will have lost the opportunity to renew our public works in broad, ambitious strokes like those of Roosevelt in the ’30s.

Alex F. Rubalcava ’02 is a government concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.