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.
5 comments On D Average for Nation’s Infrastructure
Nice blog John. Way to go and smart move with the wordpress pick.
I am not hearing much discussion of rail in the stimulus discussions. Seems to me a massive revamp of the US rail system meets a ton of goals and brings us back to the forefront with the rest of the world. Right now Accela is a national embarrassment. I need to be able to do Boston-NYC at 200MPH like a French person can.
The report card reflects voters’ shallow perceptions. Solid waste (trash pickup), bridges which you can feel shaking, parks & rec that everyone wants pristine for their kids, all got C-something. The rest are simply not obvious enough to enough people.
The C- for rail reflects not voters’ priorities but those of industry. Amtrak probably dragged that grade down.
David Hakala
http://www.linkedin.com/dhakala
Member of the Internet Press Guild since June 2001
Teacher of Cue-do, the Zen “Way of the Pool Cue”
David,
Thanks for the compliment….send me your blog and I’ll include in my blogroll. In fact, I’m having a blogroll for dinner tonight….
Obama is a big friend of commuter rail and Amtrak. Bush and McCain tried to kill Amtrak…too bad there isn’t more in the stim…but rail infrastructure is not in that bad a shape if you throw in the big Class Is……BNSF, UP, CN, CP, NSC and CSX…they’ve invested bigtime rebuilding the ROW they tore up 20-20 years ago.
David H.,
Agree on Amtrak, but as I said in my previous comment, it’s amazing Amtrak survived the past 8 years given that Bush and buddy McCain starved it to death. Here’s a book title for you: Amtrak, the Last Eight Years: A Tale of Survival.
LOL! I have two book titles of my own in the works:
Cue-do: Enlightenment Via the Zen Way of the Pool Cue
Servers, Sluts, Strippers, Dancers, and Angels: A Taxonomy of the Strip Club Ecosystem
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