If we wait for infrastructure to fail before fixing, it'll be too late

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

As Americans we are not all that interested in prevention or mitigation. When we build “for the long term,” it might be 100 years at best. We love bright, new, shiny things. Ribbon cuttings are reserved for new projects, definitely not those that only maintain existing infrastructure.

This priority on the new means that the old is left to deteriorate. As we look at critical infrastructure we have adopted, willingly or not, a “fix on failure” approach to renewing that which is old and worn out.

This thinking by elected government officials permeates all levels of government from national to state and local. In today’s world, any major project appears unable to be addressed at the local level without significant federal funding. It seems we can’t afford to fix, maintain or replace what we’ve built over the years.

Transportation projects are prime examples because they are very visible — above ground critical infrastructure. Ports, pipes and telecommunications systems may be getting old, but they are out of sight and out of mind. Roads and bridges are another matter.

For instance, in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, portions of the Cypress Street Viaduct bridge collapsed. Here in Seattle we had an exact copy of the type of construction in the form of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. It took the Nisqually Earthquake in 2001 and another 18 years of hemming and hawing to actually build a new roadway/tunnel. The old viaduct lasted around 66 years.

-more-

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2020/09/14/seattle-cant-put-off-infrastructure-repairs.html?cx_testId=6&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s

[Igel]

1. Pragmatically, it boils down to values and ranking of those values.

A lot of infrastructure was privately built; can't do that today, regulations and others' views will stop it. Take the railroad--eminent domain was a big deal, and abused, but we got railroads out of it. Now it would take years and decades in the court as everybody on all sides screamed "injustice" and tried to find ways to be wronged and therefore right.

Local infrastructure was often locally built. Texas, for example, has education and healthcare as the top two expenses in the state budget. Go back 50 years, that wasn't the case. We've ranked those two things higher than infrastructure.

Houston has problems with infrastructure for the same reasons. Some things have crowded out others.


Just rebuilding infrastructure, however, also entails injustice. We're wired to see just *some* injustices--those that we experience or those experienced by those we empathize with. For example. Some areas have had a lot more infrastructure built out. Money should be funned towards those, I guess. But what about all the people living in areas that got little infrastructure? *We* (not a narrow subset of "we", but lots of people on all sides of the various political spectrums and geographic division) built a lot of the infrastructure, through products bought or taxes paid, that makes NYC what it is.Now people assume that somehow grew one spring after especially potent rainfall and that they're entitled to making sure that that inequity in investment is maintained. (That's a really inflammatory thing to say, but it's true. Houston's port was built with federal and state investment, and it's now viewed as being something that everybody else has to help maintain to maintain Houston's prosperity, so Houston's political establishment can talk about how backwards and underdeveloped much of the state is and how Houston "carries" the state.)