Europe must start building roads and bridges again
The optimistic sixties were full of plans for a better Western Europe, not only politically, but also in daily life. They hoped the homes of the future would be filled with labour saving devices and cars would provide the mobility to a newly affluent public to travel widely. Trucks and trains would deliver the goods and stock shelves after the depredations and deprivations of WWII. A vast network of roads, tunnels and bridges would be needed. Helped by the Marshal Plan, industrious post-war societies brought the vision to reality.
Half a century later, some say Europe needs another Marshall Plan to rebuild, replace or maintain crumbling infrastructure built in the go-go days of the 1950s to the 1970s. In their unbridled effort, engineers in some cases underestimated the laws of nature, overestimated their calculations and seemed uninformed about population growth and its exponential future needs.
The Morandi Bridge collapse in Genoa, Italy on August 14 painfully serves as an example. Built in a revolutionary design, it was hailed as a marvel upon its completion in 1967 and became a symbol of the famed port city. But designer Riccardo Morandi could have overestimated the durability and strength of reinforced concrete. And the traffic it would come to carry far exceeded what he had envisioned.
The bridge’s dramatic failure has triggered a wave of reports and fears about other infrastructure in Italy. The mountainous country is literally dotted with tunnels, bridges and elevated highways.
This problem exists across Europe. France has more than 800 bridges at risk of collapse, as per an audit commissioned by the French government that found a third of the 12,000 government-maintained bridges in France need repairs. Some seven per cent present “a risk of collapse,” said the report.
Germany’s massive Leverkusen Bridge across the Rhine has been closed to heavy vehicles since 2012 when cracks were discovered in the concrete. Built in 1965, the bridge is set for replacement by 2020. Until then, heavy trucks will have to do with alternate routes.
Germany actually has the lowest infrastructure investment rate of any big, affluent economy, according to a report by the International Monetary Fund. In the 1990s, Germany invested massively to incorporate the former communist East. Then in 2001, with the economy ailing, the government had to cut spending. Ten years later, as the euro crisis again drove deficits up, politicians found it easier to cut long-term rather than current spending. Large funding for infrastructure in Germany was set aside.
Fabio Biondini, professor of structural engineering and president of the Civil Engineering Degree Programme at the Politecnico di Milano, says it’s an issue of concern. “Many studies and news reports in recent years raised alarms about the detrimental impact of aging, fatigue and deterioration processes, particularly in bridges and transportation infrastructure networks.
“This is becoming a major problem in Europe because huge stocks of bridges and infrastructure facilities built over the past 50 years are rapidly approaching the end of their service life. The scale of repair or replacement needs is particularly large all across Europe and represents a key obstacle to sustainable development of countries,” says Biondini.
The issue is so woven into the fabric of developed Europe that the true number and cost of replacing such aging infrastructure isn’t even known. But going forward, environmental and aging considerations are certainly part of the equation.
Giovanni Menduni, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, says today’s engineers and planners have a different approach. “There is a now a concept that maybe in earlier times was not so clear: infrastructure is not something that is ‘finished’ when construction is completed,” says Menduni “It is ‘live matter’ that needs continuous attention for its whole lifespan.”
So as Europe begins to address the scale of the problem, a new approach to maintaining and monitoring infrastructure is needed. “Cost-effective and reliable monitoring systems should be an essential component of modern maintenance and management systems,” says Biondini. “But measurement data from both long and short-term monitoring may be fruitless if not
Germany actually has the lowest infrastructure investment rate of any big, affluent economy, according to a report by the International Monetary Fund.
complemented by data transmission, warning systems, remote diagnostics and computational tools for lifecycle structural analysis.”
Though potential problems are lurking, Europe still racks up more than 400 billion passenger-kilometres on its rail systems yearly and one trillion kilometre-tonnes of freight on its roads, almost all of it without catastrophic incident. Its transport systems remain the most advanced in the world.
“I do not think that most of the EU infrastructure needs to be rebuilt,” notes Menduni. “But investment in maintenance is crucial. Funding, both on national and EU level, can surely be found. Many infrastructure projects are private and produce huge income volumes. A series of stricter regulatory rules and laws can help quite a lot.”
Advanced and ambitious, the infrastructure of Europe can bring wonder as travellers pass over bridges a hundred or more meters in the air. The high quality of life is well served by freight shipped from across Europe and the world. But in all that, more caution and even humility might be in order. It appears planners and leaders — indeed the populace itself — have long been asleep at the wheel.