Joe,
Tell 'em all to talk to their City Councils, County Supervisors or State Legislatures!
Why should I, a rural resident of CA, who's already paying for the incompetence my states municipal and county governments, also have to shoulder the cost of Chicago's, New Orleans', Minneapolis's and whoever else's infrastructure problems?
Not like they're a national economic positive as was the '50's interstate system.
WTF, I'm enjoying my just received CD, Ray Davies "Working Man's Cafe", and I'll be long dead before any of today's political/economic fantasies have destroyed America! Which they will! Guaranteed!
No Free Trade w/Columbia is the "canary in the coal mine".
BTW, I drink too much.

"Why should I, a rural resident of CA, who's already paying for the incompetence my states municipal and county governments, also have to shoulder the cost of Chicago's, New Orleans', Minneapolis's and whoever else's infrastructure problems?"

When you stop buying products and services that travel through Chicago, NO, or Minneapolis, we can talk. Thats the short answer at least, and it has a point.

Now whether local, state, or federeal government is making the most (or even close) of tax dollars is completely a different matter.

Just to make things interesting the California Salmon fishery is in bad shape - near freefall, and they had to close the season early. A local group advocating for the fishery has an interesting proposal - they believe that by removing 4 old dams, they can go a long way toward restoring the fishery in California.

When we look at fixing the country's infrastructure, it's also worthwhile to look at what might not need replacing at all.

The real problem is how infrastructure repair and maintenance are done. The danger is that we will continue to see cost overruns in the short term and neglect in the long run.

The Oakland Bay bridge, for example, is four times over budget because of an unnecessarily difficult suspension design. The Minneapolis bridge that fell down was of a type that USDOT had flagged as a dangerous category of bridge and that should have been rehabilitated or replaced after the Mianus bridge collapse in West Virginia in 1983.

This is not just a problem of government or lack of public interest. It is also a problem of engineering practice, in which public works are all too often designed anonymously or designed with only two of the three requirements of efficiency, economy, and elegance in mind. In fact, you need all three if you want public works to be safe and affordable and if public concern for maintenance is to be sustained.

I think one of the main problems we're facing right now is that a lot of "maintenance" projects aren't really that sexy. There has been all of the arguments of "pork barrel" spending coming out of Washington, and many of the projects seem to be for building some new shiny (Rock & Roll Museum, etc.) that people can look at in some misplaced admiration and say "look what my Congressman brought me."

Meanwhile, the currently existing roads, bridges, water systems do get neglected, because it's not something people think about much. Atlanta's Water System
is a good example of this. We are more interested in bickering over water for endangered species and intra-state rivalries, and we have a major problem to fix here. (I'm on the Northwest side of Atlanta, near the smaller of our reservoirs, and watched large parts of it go completely dry this year) But no one will ever see the water system, so I haven't seen much of a push to get it done.

No matter where the money is collected, where it is spent needs to be chosen differently than it currently is.

Its nearly impossible to get funding for new projects, let alone the upkeep to the existing infrastructure. We piss away far too much on social programs, wealth transfers, and illegal aliens to even begin to tackle the real problems we face. I just dont see how we will ever begin to tackle these real problems given the elected officials we have, and the ignorant populace that elect them.

Are there any stats on the number of 'big project' civil engineering firms?

Because the simplest things (flat straight road) seem to have actually regressed from an automation and price-per-mile standpoint.

"Are there any stats on the number of 'big project' civil engineering firms?

Because the simplest things (flat straight road) seem to have actually regressed from an automation and price-per-mile standpoint."

Domestic US roads are built and maintained by state highway departments. Large bridges are often contracted out. The real need is to have special juries make the choice of design, as was done for the U.S. Naval Academy bridge at Annapolis.

I think building a world-class Fiber Optic roadband infrastructure should be an even higher priority than re-doing roads.

The US needs $55 Billion in Internet infrastructure buildout by 2011, as per BusinessWeek.

Keep in mind that high gasoline prices will not just reduce driving (and thus wear and tear on roads), but there is a big push among automakers to shave hundreds of pounds out of new cars. Both Toyota and Nissan expect that by 2013, their new cars will have lost 500-600 pounds each (15-20% of their weight). This too lightens the wear and tear on roads.

18-wheelers are also going to have a ton or two shaved off, for the same reasons.

Thus, Internet first, bridges second, and roads last, IMO.

GK,

Wow, that's a lot of build-out. Yes, we should do it, though it would be expensive.

On the other hand, it would be only 4 months of the cost of Iraq.

One somewhat interesting point is that a decent communication infrastructure might have a useful effect on total road miles. I really don't know for sure, but how many miles are done by people driving to meetings that could just as well be replaced by videoconferencing? Another practice that might increase with decent comms links is teleworking, particularly in jobs that mostly involve data manipulation - which these days is quite a lot of them.

It is a fairly well-known fact that the USA's Internet and cellphone infrastructure compares pretty badly to that of most countries in Europe, even in the cities where the effect of America's much larger size is somewhat neutralised. I haven't been able to find out what those in the know think is the reason for this. The perils of early adoption perhaps? One support for this idea is the relative quality of US and European broadcast TV signals - not only lower resolution but even the US public think that NTSC stands for "Never the Same Color". Program quality is a completely separate issue from this.

EU broadband Internet usage as a proportion of population is slightly over 50%, even taking into account the newer, and somewhat impoverished, southern states (example: Greece). The coverage in the USA is rather less, and there is a great deal of room for improvement.

It is arguable that public utilities (and this would seem to include the Internet these days) are one of the areas where government should step in if private industry isn't getting it done. It's just too important to be left to chance.

Fletcher Christian,

I think early adoption is the reason we have lagged in broadband. The American public accessed the Internet in the 1990s over the telephone network using dial-up connections that were cheaper than in Europe. But trying to web surf now over dial-up is like trying to drive cars through the older streets of European cities.