The Dodge Retort

The American Society of Civil Engineers has issued a damning report card on America’s infrastructure that looks an awful lot like my high school grades -   Cs and Ds. Actually, ASCE only gave out four Cs, the rest Ds in 15 categories such as rail, roads, dams, transit, aviation, energy and wastewater. Average grade was a D which would boot out any student out of college.

The truth be told, I got mostly Bs, a few Cs and maybe one D. Wouldn’t it be nice if the nation’s infrastructure did that well?

The Report Card is an indictment of the nation’s infrastructure and its overseers (that’s us…), but should come as no surprise. Once you build it, you have to maintain it. The mentality of ignoring out these vital facets of our society ties into living beyond our means and slavish worship of Wall Street fortunes no matter what the consequences. We lost sight of what was important and only now seem to be realizing it.

Anyhow, the report card says it’ll cost $2.trillion to repair over next five years. Of course, civil engineers have a huge vested interest in seeing us spend gazillions on infrastructure. But all you need to do is drive under a few crumbling highway overpasses to know the report card is pretty damned close to the truth.  If my kids weren’t already chasing their dreams in college, I might try to persuade at least one of them to pursue civil engineering.