Infrastructure is boring — until it fails
When I was covering the Donald Trump administration in the U.S. for the Star, there was a running joke among the Washington press gallery that next week was always going to be “Infrastructure Week” in the White House.
See, Trump had once promised it was coming up, because infrastructure is the kind of thing everyone agrees is important. But then it never arrived, because infrastructure is the kind of thing that never seems interesting enough to carry a news cycle, which was a prime Trump priority-setting criteria.
So often, when another scandal or crisis or meltdown happened, a reporter would guess at how the president might try to turn the page to distract attention from bad press: “Next week: Infrastructure Week!”
The news out of Baltimore this week, where the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by a container ship, puts those old jokes in a new perspective. Here we have a key piece of infrastructure — a main route into and out of Baltimore, roughly five times as long as the Prince Edward Viaduct in Toronto — that carried 30,000 vehicles a day. It was the main route for trucks carrying explosives and hazardous materials because those things are considered too dangerous to take in the tunnels that cross the same Patapsco River into the city.
That’s what was utterly destroyed in the course of under a minute this week.
Six people are dead. The collapse will devastate a city whose economy still revolves around the port, and a region reliant on that port for shipping. The entire transportation and traffic network of the area will be a mess for months and years to come.
Perhaps if Infrastructure Week had come sooner, this somehow could have been avoided. Perhaps not, though: President Joe Biden has made infrastructure investments one of his vaunted stimulus projects. There are just so many.
The Baltimore Key Bridge was inspected just last year, and declared “satisfactory.” It wasn’t on any list of emergency projects. The problem was that it was built in 1973, when a massive bridge was considered good to go even if it was, as authorities call it, “fracture critical,” which means a single span collapsing can lead to all the other spans collapsing.
In the U.S., the Star’s Richard Warnica reported from Baltimore, there are 17,468 fracture-critical bridges currently in use.
They need a whole lot of infrastructure weeks.
Bridge authorities in Canada have, this week, insisted Canada’s biggest bridges are safe. But let’s not get too smug: A 2019 Canadian Infrastructure Report Card said 39 per cent of Canada’s bridges are either in “poor” or “fair” condition, in need of $21 billion of maintenance to meet current standards.
But beyond bridges, our infrastructure maintenance in general needs attention. We see it in Toronto, where we refer to unattended needs in this regard as a “state-ofgood-repair backlog.” As I noted just this month, that backlog at the TTC — which suffered a train derailment last year and is seeing rail car slowdowns now because of poor track condition — is over $8 billion.
During the 2024 budget process, Toronto staff estimated the total state-of-good-repair backlog for all departments would grow over the next 10 years to $22.7 billion.
There could be a joke at Toronto city hall about “state of good repair week” to parallel the Trump-era infrastructure talk. The topic always comes up in staff briefings at city hall. Council often — as it did last month regarding transit — will vote to declare how high a priority it is. But it’s hard to cut a ribbon on a bridge that was reinforced or host a press conference to celebrate a new subway signal system that will keep trains running safely.
Sort of like how, prior to 2020, it was easy enough for governments to try to cut funding for public health programs, because it was hard to see what they were accomplishing in good times, or times when they succeeded in preventing outbreaks of serious illness. It took a pandemic for the value to become fully evident.
Our infrastructure is kind of like that. We all know why it is important. But it’s easy enough to put the urgency of it in the back of our minds most of the time, when nothing has literally fallen down yet, and we have so many other important things we also need to deal with. You might even joke about it, as Torontonians did when pieces of the Gardiner Expressway were falling off a decade ago, or as Americans did when Trump was president.
And then a bridge collapses, and those jokes don’t seem all that funny any more. Let’s hope we can learn from our neighbour’s example.