Transformative, not duplicative.
From National Affairs:
....MUCH MOREFor decades, the idea of investing more in America's physical infrastructure has enjoyed support from across the political spectrum. In 2009, President Barack Obama made an infrastructure-heavy stimulus package the first item of his legislative agenda. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump bragged that he would repair "crumbling roads and bridges" and "dilapidated airports" as a key part of his effort to "Make America Great Again." Democrats, meanwhile, opened the "jobs" plank of their 2016 platform with a promise to make "major federal investments to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure."In a rare moment of political comity, President Trump and congressional Democrats even agreed to spend $2 trillion on new infrastructure in April 2019. While the deal itself quickly collapsed, it's almost impossible to think of another issue requiring significant new spending where the two parties could reach such an agreement today. And infrastructure is popular among the public, too: An April 2019 poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 89% of Americans — including majorities from both parties — wanted to spend as much or more than we do right now on roads and bridges. Add to that a bevy of reports and the conventional wisdom suggesting America faces an infrastructure crisis, and the case for a massive repair program seems more urgent than ever.
A look at the facts, however, reveals a very different picture than many popular accounts convey: There is no evidence that America's infrastructure is crumbling or that it is not globally competitive. Indeed, judged by its performance, our existing infrastructure works well. Rather than building more of what it already has, therefore, America should direct its new investments toward visionary projects on the scale of the transcontinental railroad, the interstate-highway system, and the internet, all of which have helped the nation achieve its status as world leader.
STRUCTURALLY SOUNDFor all the alarming headlines, the evidence of an American infrastructure crisis is mostly derived from a source with an obvious bias: the "report cards" produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The ASCE is a trade association. Its most recent national report, written in 2017, grades the nation's infrastructure a D+ and calls for drastic action: "Deteriorating U.S. infrastructure is impeding our ability to compete," the engineers write. "[I]mprovements are necessary to ensure our country is built for the future."
While these report cards are certainly honest on their own terms, one has to realize that they are produced by an organization chartered to "advance civil engineering." If the ASCE didn't continually find a need for spending more on civil engineering and creating more jobs for civil engineers, its members would leave. So, rather than accepting what trade organizations say, it makes the most sense to examine the actual performance of American infrastructure. By these measures, America scores pretty well, both by absolute standards and in comparison to other countries. This can be seen in the condition of our roads, our commercial-cargo facilities, our freight-rail, and our water systems.
Let's start with the most extensive and commonly encountered piece of America's infrastructure: roads. When it comes to their most important task — enabling people to commute to work — American roads perform quite well. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Americans enjoy one of the shortest average commutes to work in the developed world at only 27 minutes. This is shorter than that of any other member of the G-7. And America's roads — which carry more than 90% of commuters — are in better shape than they were in the past: As Brown University's Matthew Turner observes in a report for the Brookings Institution, road quality consistently improved every year from 1993 to 2015 (the year for which the most recent data is available).
Meanwhile, our supposedly decrepit bridges, though frequently in the headlines, are not quite the danger they are reported to be. About 9% of bridges are, under the criteria of the National Bridge Inspection Standards, "structurally deficient." This sounds scary, but as the Virginia Department of Transportation writes, "[t]he fact that a bridge is ‘structurally deficient' does not imply that it is likely to collapse or that it is unsafe. It means the bridge must be monitored, inspected and maintained." A bridge becomes structurally deficient if any part of it — deck, superstructure, or substructure — rates a score of four or less on a zero-to-nine scale that civil engineers use. In any case, the number of structurally deficient bridges is falling, from 12% in 2009 to just above 9% in 2016. It's not surprising, then, that more people (20) died from lighting strikes in 2019 than have died in bridge collapses resulting from maintenance or construction problems since 2000 (13, all in one incident).
A look at commercial transportation — mostly the movement of shipping containers and trailer trucks between roads, ports, and rail lines — tells a similar story. In the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index, America ranks seventh in overall infrastructure — statistically tied with Singapore. The countries ranking above the United States are all far smaller geographically, making it much easier for them to maintain their infrastructures. The country that ranked number one on the bank's index, Germany, is about the size of Montana, and is seven times more densely packed than the United States. U.S. infrastructure overall, the World Bank finds, greatly outperforms that of wealthy countries like Canada and Australia that have similarly low population densities.
America's freight-rail system is likely the best in the world. Not only does the United States ship the most freight by rail of any country in the world, it also ships much more freight per capita than its economic peers. For purposes of comparison, the United States ships 5,000 ton-miles of rail freight per person per year, compared to just 500 in the European Union. Indeed, the U.S. freight system is not only faster, bigger, more frequently used, and more efficient than that of any other developed country, it is also less expensive. America's freight-rail costs are about half of what they were in real dollar terms when freight railroads were deregulated in the early 1980s. It's worth noting, however, that this highly efficient and productive freight system has come partly at the expense of passenger trains (more on this below).
The performance of water infrastructure, a topic recently in the news, is difficult to measure for international comparison purposes, since virtually everyone who wants clean running water and modern toilets has access to them in every developed country, including the United States. The fact that elevated lead levels in Flint, Michigan's drinking water were a (fully justified) national scandal is a testament to America's success in this regard. Indeed, in the last several decades, drinking-water systems have only continued to improve throughout the United States. In 2017, 93% of Americans were serviced by community water systems that had no violations of clean drinking-water standards, up from 79% when measurement under current standards began in 1993. Most violations, furthermore, involve minor issues such as paperwork errors or elevated levels of contaminants that would do harm if allowed to persist but are likely benign when corrected quickly. In short, almost no one in America lacks access to modern plumbing or clean drinking water.
For all the complaints about its airports, America's air-travel infrastructure also does well when it comes to actual performance. It is both heavily used and productive: Americans average about 2.5 passenger air trips per capita annually. Except for a few small countries that have major air hubs — Ireland, Iceland, and the United Arab Emirates — this average is greater than that of travelers from anywhere else in the world. And America's airports, in quality and maintenance, are roughly similar to those around the developed world. True, a few major airports like New York's LaGuardia are dirty and have poor amenities (although an overhaul is in progress there), and the plushest airports in Asia are, indeed, much nicer than anything that exists in the United States or Europe. The biggest problems facing American airports are related not to physical infrastructure, however, but to the number of flights allowed in certain key hub airports. For a variety of reasons — many of them related to politics, antitrust concerns, and favoritism — these numbers are far more limited than they should be. But the main point is that this causes far more problems than inadequate infrastructure does.
Likewise, America's telecommunications infrastructure is probably the world's best. Not only are nearly all of the democratic world's large data-center providers based in the United States, but U.S. internet (after lagging for years) is about twice as fast as the global average and ahead of all the other G-7 countries except France. The internet has also reached the entire American population: The United States has 293 million internet users, which is just about equal to its total non-institutionalized population aged nine years or older. And by most accounts, the United States appears ready for 5G: After years of fretting that America was falling behind in the race to implement 5G mobile networks, the CTIA, the trade association that represents the wireless communications industry (and which, like the ASCE, has incentive to claim that the country is "falling behind" in order to claim subsidies), observes not only that the nation is ready for 5G, but that in fact it is leading the way.
This does not mean that America leads the world in all areas of infrastructure. Indeed, we lag behind in several respects. In many cases, it's obvious why. For example, Netherlands and the United Kingdom have vastly better flood-protection systems than the United States, but as small, wealthy, low-lying, land-constrained countries, these investments make sense in a way they simply would not in the United States.
The same can be said for passenger rail. By any reasonable standard, America's intercity railroad system is slower, less frequently used, and less efficient than those in most of the European Union, China, and wealthy Asian countries. Yet this is largely because passenger rail is just not practical in large parts of the United States. Trains are useful for trips of 300 miles or fewer and for people who do business near major train stations. At longer distances, however, they become far less efficient. In Japan, which invented modern high-speed rail and likely has the best such system in the world, the two largest metropolitan conglomerations — centered near Tokyo and Osaka — are about 300 miles apart. America's two largest metropolitan areas, New York and Los Angeles, are nearly 3,000 miles apart. Better high-speed rail — if built in a cost-effective manner — could make sense between major cities in the Northeast, as well as between the metropolises in California (where the state has started work on a system), Florida, and Texas (where a privately financed project is moving forward). But it isn't practical in most of the country, and doing it quickly would require replacing freight-rail lines, which are almost certainly more economically useful than better passenger service would be. Such a system will prove hard to build without thousands of miles of new tracks, a massive investment that few are willing to make.
In some respects, American mass transit is also underdeveloped relative to that of other countries, but this seems to be due more to culture than anything else. The main reason for this underdevelopment isn't that the United States does not invest in transit. In fact, America has opened more than 20 new urban streetcar or light-rail systems since 2000 — about the same number per capita as the European Union. Rather, the driving force behind America's relatively weak mass transit is that the bulk of American transit development happened after the advent of the automobile.
But the reasons also go deeper than cost or timing: Americans just don't like to ride public transit if they can avoid it, even when it is available and takes them where they need it to go. The Washington, D.C., and Toronto metropolitan areas serve as useful comparisons. Each has about the same population (6.2 million and 5.9 million, respectively). While D.C. has a larger subway system (118 miles versus 48 miles), the two cities have similarly large commuter-rail systems (although Toronto's runs more frequently) and roughly equal bus services. And like D.C., Toronto has seen most of its growth occur during the age of the automobile. Yet D.C. has about half of Toronto's per-capita transit ridership and about a quarter of the rail boardings per mile of track. Some of the difference may be due to the fact that people in D.C. have higher incomes and access to cheaper gasoline, but just as much can be explained by the fact that historically, Americans have supported policy decisions that encourage automobile-reliant urban planning and lower-density cities. It is therefore unlikely that any amount of investment or quality improvement could get Americans to ride transit even at the rate Canadians do, much less at the European or Asian rates....
