Are We Fiddling While Our Infrastructure is Crumbling?

Q: The Minneapolis bridge collapse has me concerned. I know roads, bridges and other infrastructure in my area are about to fall apart. Money to fix these essential services started drying up years ago. I’d like to get involved in a concerted effort to address this problem. How do you suggest I get involved?

A: The quality of our nation’s infrastructure is one of the biggest strategic issues facing our country.

Our grandparents and parents understood the importance of investment in these critical quality of life issues. Air quality, water quality, standards of living, business climate and many other issues we confront all come back to the same issue, investment in our aging infrastructure. It is unfortunate that it takes the collapse of a bridge to focus the public on this issue, even for a short period of time.

Lack of Concerted Effort

Due to the many competing interests for infrastructure investment, there is no single concerted effort to address the overall problem. Specific groups are focused on specific issues and often end up competing with each other for scarce resources.

For example, it is unfortunate that transportation projects compete against clean water projects that are competing against more politically salable issues like education and health care.

The public is more politically energized by the immediacy of illness rather than the somewhat unrecognized and difficult long term solutions to water, air and transportation quality.

Let’s look at the complexity of collection of funding for transportation projects as an example.

In many instances, the primary sources for transportation funding come from local tax revenues. Traditionally, gasoline taxes have been the primary sources for road and bridge funding. With the complexity of our modern transportation systems, issues such as alternative fuels and non-gasoline-powered vehicles make the traditional cents-per-gallon-of-gasoline approach inequitable.

Several groups both at the federal and local levels are looking at new models. Public/private partnerships allow for investors to build, operate and maintain roads outside of the traditional governmental model, funded by investors and tolling.

Sales taxes paid by everyone also can result in a more equitable distribution of income collection for transportation projects. Even those without vehicles benefit from an efficient, safe transportation system. Measurements of vehicle miles traveled through various GPS systems may be another method to more fairly collect funding.

This does not begin to address the other infrastructure needs, the various funding models based on changes in our economy and technology or the determination of the projects that are most important to complete first, while taking into consideration the public interest in environmental issues.

The longer we wait, the worse these problems are getting. In a Nero-esque fashion, we are fiddling while our infrastructure is crumbling.

For personal involvement to help fix this problem, I would suggest that your best avenue is to choose the issue that you find most troubling personally and get involved with one of the many groups trying to raise the public awareness of these issues. Since you specifically mentioned transportation, a good place to start would be your state Department of Transportation.

The American Association of State Transportation Officials has an excellent website to guide you in this direction, www.transportation.org. This Web site is rich with links to a number of transportation related groups that would welcome your help in addressing this need.

Do you have questions on construction human resources or safety?
E-mail them to Leonard Toenjes at ltoenjes@agcstl.org or
craig_barner@mcgraw-hill.com.

(If Len picks your question,
he will answer it in a future issue of Midwest Construction.)