Rebuild from the Roads Up

It would be quite unfortunate to graduate with a Harvard degree, get an impressive job that lets you rake in cash, or save lots of people, but not be able to get there each morning because of the traffic that consumes most American cities. It would be even less auspicious if you tried to save money by living right outside the city, and while sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic going to work one day, the bridge you were on collapsed. Yet gridlocked traffic, increasingly long commutes, and sub-par roads and highways are becoming an accepted part of everyday life.

This inconvenience is slowly turning into a legitimate danger; about 27.1 percent of the nation’s 590,750 bridges are rated by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to be either “functionally obsolete” or “structurally deficient.” The rating of “structurally deficient” is the same rating that was given to the I-35W Bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River in Minnesota in 2007, and while not every bridge receiving that rating is in danger of imminent structural failure, the large number of bridges in that category, and the millions of Americans who travel on them daily, makes this issue a real concern.

As Americans watch the financial markets crash and burn, it is essential not to allow the rest of the world around us to do so as well, but the state of our nation’s transportation infrastructure is getting to be so dire that immediate attention is crucial.

Unfortunately, the primary obstacle to fixing our infrastructure is exactly the problem that anyone still reading is facing; infrastructure is profoundly, unequivocally, and utterly unexciting. There are no union-like picketers banding together to rally for the local toll road. There are no passionate highway rights activists waging sit-ins until freeways receive the new lanes they need to survive. There are no “Save the Bridges” campaigns, and no “I Stand with Route 84” bumper stickers. Despite the staggering number of people served by any individual road or bridge (except the proposed Bridge to Nowhere of course), there are few citizens who take up the cause of its maintenance and repair.

Furthermore, a citizenry that is generally unmoved by the infrastructure mission means that few local politicians are willing to take it up. Why would a state senator forgo championing funding for social services, education, or welfare, and the valuable voter support that comes with it, in favor of an infrastructure overhaul that most constituents don’t even understand the necessity of? The answer is that he or she would not and do not, leading to a precarious rotting of the infrastructure network that forms the arteries and veins connecting our nation’s vital organs.

The ASCE estimates that it would take $1.6 trillion over a span of five years in order to bring the nation’s infrastructure into a state of good repair. Looking at merely one subcategory of these projects—transportation infrastructure—the Department of Transportation estimates that in order to simply maintain current highway and bridge conditions, it will cost $78.7 billion per year. Unfortunately, in reporting on the current state of US infrastructure, the ASCE gave it a ‘D,’ thereby indicating that simply maintaining it will not be sufficient. DOT estimates assert that the required amount for eliminating the backlog of projects for bridges and fulfilling proposed highway improvements could cost as much as 131.7 billion dollars per year for the next 20 years.

With this massive sum of money necessary for maintaining our current infrastructure as well as meeting growth and repair needs, and with the current and possible public funding levels insufficient to even graze those needs, it is apparent that new funding solutions are needed. Private funding has a significant potential role to play in repairing America’s aging infrastructure, as it has for years all over the globe. Public–private partnerships, or PPPs, are defined by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) as “institutional arrangement in which a private entity assumes some level of risk beyond that traditionally associated with supplying its services to a government agency.” A recent report by the GAO provides examples of PPPs for highway infrastructure in the U.S., and highlights those which involve the management of an existing entity—such as the lease of the Chicago Skyway to a private entity for $1.83 billion or the lease of the Indiana Toll Road for $3.85 billion—as well as those which involve bidding out contracts to build and operate new toll roads, such as the part of the Trans-Texas Corridor which calls for a new toll road between Dallas and San Antonio. These transactions usually provide the municipality or state with an upfront cash supply which could, and should, then be used for further infrastructure projects.

While PPPs are by no means a panacea—not every infrastructure project is suited for collaboration between the private and public sectors and there are other proposed solutions, like increased tolling, congestion pricing, encouraging reduction of demand, or a national infrastructure fund to be bankrolled by ending the Iraq War (the favored plan of Obama)—it has already proven to be a useful option in solving a giant problem that receives an absurdly low degree of attention commensurate with how many people are affected every day. Although both presidential nominees made reference to the infrastructure crisis in speeches, neither did so in a substantive and extensive way, instead resigning this issue to platitude-filled policy-bites. McCain did not even include the issue on his campaign website.

But who can blame them? They were both vying to be servants of the people, and until Americans begin to care about our transportation networks, neither will our representatives. In the meantime, our aging, overextended, grandfather of an infrastructure system will continue to rot, and we will continue to spend mindless hours in traffic, unless of course the bridge collapses from under us.


Dana A. Stern ’09 is a government concentrator in Adams House. She worked at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and attended the conference "The Private Role in Public Infrastructure."