Airports (D):
The Trump administration promises to pump $1 trillion into improving the country’s crumbling infrastructure, but a benchmark report says it will take almost $4.6 trillion over the next eight years to bring all those systems up to an acceptable standard.
The price tag has grown steadily for 15 years while an expanding country focused on building new infrastructure rather than maintaining existing systems that were nearing the end of their service life.
Since 2001, the cost of repairing those systems has mushroomed from $1.3 trillion to the current figure, more than three times greater, according to an assessment released last week by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The report comes out every four years.
It gave U.S. infrastructure an overall grade of D-plus, the same grade it received in 2013, “suggesting only incremental progress was made over the last four years.”
“We need our elected leaders — those who pledged to rebuild our infrastructure on the campaign trail — to follow through on those promises with investment and innovative solutions,” ASCE President Norma Jean Mattrei said.
President Donald Trump reiterated those campaign promises in both his inaugural address and in his recent address to Congress, but the only supporting detail for that pledge thus far has been an 11-page white paper issued in October. In that document, Trump said the money would be raised by granting private investors an 82 percent tax credit that would encourage them to pump money into infrastructure projects.
“Tax credits, to the extent that they are useful, are more helpful to new projects,” said Carl Weisbrod, former New York City planning director. “Tax breaks are really not that useful in state-of-good-repair projects. We can’t begin to meet our true needs unless we get lots of help from the federal government.”
Congressional leaders and state and local officials have made clear that while private investors might put money into select projects in urban areas from which they can expect a return, they would shy away from investment in rural areas and would rather build new infrastructure than repair systems that have deteriorated.
“We’ll have much more success if we’re talking about direct (federal) funding than any other kind of funding,” said Anne Fadullon, planning director for the city of Philadelphia.
Infrastructure provides for the substance of every day life in the United States, covering far more than the roads and bridges the term commonly evokes. It includes a vast network of other systems that most people take for granted, including drinking water and sewer service, the electrical supply system, railroads, transit systems, and ports.
The ASCE has been chronicling the decline of infrastructure category by category since 1998, when it took over the task that had been handled for a decade by the National Council on Public Works Improvements.
In recent years, most of the 14 categories assessed received a D, and hardly any moved by more than a fraction of a grade. For example, inland waterways were judged to improve from a D-minus to a D, while transit systems declined from a grade of D to a D-minus.
The commentary provided with each grade was revealing:
Congestion at airports is growing, with 24 of the big airports expected to achieve “Thanksgiving-peak-traffic-volume” at least one day each week.
Four in 10 of the country’s 614,387 bridges are more than 50 years old and near the end of their designed life span. Nearly 59,000 are structurally deficient.
Bridges (C-plus): Dams (D):
An estimated 2,170 of the country’s 90,580 dams are considered as “high-hazard potential” because of failed upkeep.
Drinking water (D):
There are 240,000 water main breaks each year, wasting 2 trillion gallons of water.
Electricity (D-plus):
Most electrical transmission lines were built in the 1950s and 1960s with a 50-year life