Things Fall Apart

Americans aren't just paying for the country's decaying public infrastructure with their pocketbooks. Now they are paying with their lives. The August 1 collapse of one of Minneapolis's most heavily trafficked bridges, which sent more than fifty vehicles crashing into the Mississippi River, is the latest in a string of infrastructure failures threatening public safety. In early July, on a busy runway at New York's La Guardia Airport, two airliners nearly collided in a "runway incursion," a phenomenon so common, said a spokesperson for the National Transportation Safety Board, they "only investigate a small percentage of them." Later that month, a steam pipe exploded in midtown Manhattan, flinging mud and asbestos for blocks and sending dozens to the hospital.

Everywhere one looks, the results of decades of public neglect and underinvestment are clear: not only collapsing bridges and exploding steam pipes but traffic-choked streets, clogged ports, corroded drinking-water systems and power brownouts. From 1950 to 1970 the government spent more than 3 percent of GDP on infrastructure. After 1980, that figure dropped by more than a third.

Two years ago, following the catastrophic collapse of the levees in New Orleans, which cost more than 1,000 lives, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issued a report cataloguing the myriad deficiencies in our nation's infrastructure. That report was followed by a number of other worrying findings. The Transportation Department, for example, estimated that freight bottlenecks were costing the economy $200 billion a year. The Environmental Protection Agency warned of antiquated drinking-water and waste-water systems that would require more than $541 billion a year to rebuild over the next twenty years. And the Federal Highway Administration has calculated that some $141 billion will be needed every year for the next twenty years to repair deficient roads and bridges. All told, the ASCE estimated, the government would need to spend $1.6 trillion over the next five years to repair infrastructure. And that estimate did not address our lagging deployment of high-speed broadband or the major expenditures needed to reduce carbon emissions to stave off climate change.

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