Our Ailing Infrastructure

An article in Friday's Washington Post shines a light on an often-overlooked problem that impacts all of us: The aging of our country's infrastructure. These paragraphs, in particular, caught my eye:

Nevertheless, the overall national infrastructure is stuck in a "death spiral," as states repeatedly fail to maintain the status quo condition of their transportation networks, Pisarski said. Maintenance standards slip further as the money is spread thin.

Diminishing tax revenue and surging costs have put a double squeeze on state transportation departments, transportation experts said. While federal gas tax rates have remained at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, construction costs have been increasing 20 percent a year in some areas. The price of steel, oil and concrete are all up, partly driven by demand for raw materials in China, where the government is busy laying out a national highway system of its own.

"We're going to run out of capacity pretty quick, and that is going to put a grinding halt on productivity, profitability and our way of life," said Janet Kavinoky, director of transportation infrastructure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

While the Post article focuses on our highway infrastructure, we shouldn't forget our other infrastructure woes: Our power grid, our dams, our railroads and our airports. Simply put, we have hundreds of billions of dollars — and probably years to decades — worth of work that needs to be done on our highways, our airports, our railroads and our power generation and transmission grid.

These aren't just repairs we're talking about; this is about replacement. Much of our national highway infrastructure was built 50 years ago. There are more people driving and more people driving heavier vehicles on these highways than the original plans envisioned. What originally was developed as a means of being able to move military resources around the county in the event of a war with the Soviet Union didn't count on moving thousands of SUVs thousands of miles on family vacations.

The single largest problem I see with beginning to tackle these improvements and repairs is funding. Once more we find ourselves presented with a set of problems that requires public funding, funding that largely isn't available thanks to state and Federal tax cuts.

Not to be too terribly discouraging (after all, the day I read this, Friday, was my birthday!), but I also don't see very many political leaders with the chutzpah to step up and state the obvious: Unless we want to carry on doing things that we have come to accept as safe & relatively risk free in an environment that is becoming less stable thanks to an aging and overwhelmed infrastructure, we need to significantly increase public finances to help meet the challenges of repair and improvement. Thanks to the resource squeeze due to China's continued development, we'd better find some political leadership who will do this sooner rather than later, because it's only going to become more expensive as time goes by.