No matter whether politically speaking you lean to the left or lean to the right, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 15 to 20 years, you know that America’s infrastructure is in a pretty sorry state. From crumbling highways to unsafe bridges to transportation networks that are way behind the times, the U.S. has a lot of work to do to catch up to a myriad of other industrialized nations around the globe.
In fact, in some categories, the United States is approaching third-world status, and the costs to revitalize all its public structures and systems is growing every year.
We compiled a list of 11 reasons why the U.S. is seriously hurting in the infrastructure department — and what may have to change to cure these woes.
- Structurally Deficient Bridges
The American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) says that nearly 56,000 of the country’s bridges are “structurally deficient.” That’s a nice way of saying that they’re majorly unsafe. This is despite the fact that nearly 185 million crossings of these bridges are made by average vehicles every day.
- Old Bridges
One of the reasons why many of these bridges are “structurally deficient” is likely because they’re old — more than 50 years old, to be exact, in the case of at least one out of every four of them. Not only is that percentage of bridges that old, but according to the ARTBA, these precarious structures “have never had major reconstruction work.” This would seem to be more than enough to qualify most of them in an “accidents waiting to happen” category.
- Sorry Airports
While the U.S. has more than enough airports to serve its population, not one of them is considered to be among the Top 25 airports in the world. Think about that — the world’s number one economy can’t even come close to having one of the developed world’s best or most efficient airports.
If you’ve ever flown out of LaGuardia in New York City or O’Hare in Chicago, you might be convinced the U.S. has a few contenders for the worst — or at least, most inefficient — airports in the world. Certainly, in terms of travel time, cosmetics, baggage losses and customer service, we’ve got a long way to go.
- Weak Dams
The recent near-failure of Southern California’s Oroville Dam (the tallest dam in the United States) only reminded American citizens that some of our most critical infrastructure elements are also some of our most neglected. When a government order comes for 188,000 people to evacuate, you know we don’t just have a minor problem on our hands. As with our country’s bridges, many of the country’s dams (like Oroville) are catastrophes just waiting to happen.
- Structurally Unsound Infrastructure as a Whole
Three years ago, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave not just the country’s dams but the nation’s infrastructure as a whole a “D+” grade. The ASCE said then that major investment — to the tune of $3.6 trillion — was needed by 2020.
Since that report, almost nothing significant has been accomplished in terms of infrastructure improvement other than the country electing a new president who’s made vague promises to take actions that his predecessors haven’t (more about that below).
- Congested Highways
Whether it takes you two hours to go five miles, or your commute that might have been 30 minutes 20 years ago now takes double that time, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that transportation delays translate to economic losses. In fact, the costs associated with traffic congestion nationwide are roughly $101 billion a year — money that could be put to other uses if it weren’t such an unavoidable issue.
- Bad Roads
And why is congestion such a problem? In part it’s because the Department of Transportation (DOT) has said that more than two-thirds of the country’s roads are “in dire need of repairs or upgrades.”
Could that be why your car needs to have its tires aligned? Or worse, is that why you need to fix the axle on your vehicle that broke when you drove into a pothole the size of a moon crater on your local highway? When more and more drivers avoid taking certain roads because of the poor shape they’re in, you know there are serious issues with the nation’s roads.
- High Repair Costs
By some DOT estimates, fixing merely the above-mentioned bridges and highways would cost more than $808 billion alone. Of that figure, more than half — $479.1 billion to be exact — would be necessary to cover “critically needed repairs.” And of course, the longer we wait to tackle these jobs, the higher the repair costs will be when (or if) they indeed get fixed.
- Federal Infrastructure Spending
Well, you might say — since the government is certainly aware of all these problems, isn’t it doing something about them? Isn’t it boosting spending on infrastructure repairs? Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that just the opposite is true; infrastructure spending has actually decreased by 9 percent over the past decade, mostly under the administration of ex-President Obama (despite his near-doubling of the national debt — isn’t that a neat trick?)
- Economic Costs
Of course, all these deficiencies have real economic consequences. This month, Bloomberg News projected “that by 2025, shortfalls in infrastructure investment will subtract as much as $3.9 trillion from the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.” That’s serious money, and obviously, this number is less than the ASCE number cited above for fixes, so the question is, when will Congress realize that it only makes sense to make the investments in repairing all of the above now before it gets worse, and costs rise above the Bloomberg estimate?
It obviously doesn’t help that the nation’s debt is already high and getting higher, but President Trump is correct in saying that the time is right to commit at least a trillion dollars to national infrastructure, as opposed to foreign conflicts and entanglements that end up netting us nothing in return.
Here’s hoping that both parties in Congress can see the light of day on this issue and agree for once that the president’s proclamations have nothing to do with petty partisan squabbles.
~ American Liberty Report
