Editor’s letter

There’s a specific feeling I get whenever I fly into New York’s JFK airport and start to make the drive home. It feels exactly like turbulence. The roads around the nation’s busiest international air hub are littered with moon crater–size potholes, which make for a juddering and profanity-filled (“Oh, my poor bleeping suspension”) experience. This isn’t a uniquely New York problem: According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 43 percent of roads across the U.S. are in poor or mediocre condition. And the decay goes beyond holes in the blacktop. More than 40 percent of the country’s bridges are at least 50 years old, and about 46,150 have been given the worrying designation “structurally deficient.” Some 178 million trips are made across these decrepit bridges every day. At the current rate of investment, it will take until 2071 to make all the repairs currently needed to those spans—but by then, of course, many other bridges will have fallen into a dangerous state of disrepair.

President Biden’s new $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill is being pitched as a way to speed those repairs and to build the other basic structural assets a country needs to compete in the 21st century. (See Talking Points, p.16.) It would pump $100 billion into expanding broadband networks—about 35 percent of rural homes lack access to high-speed internet—and another $100 billion into modernizing public school buildings, which currently get a D+ grade from the ASCE. It’s fair to debate whether taxpayers or private enterprise should foot the bill for these projects, but what’s clear is that this country needs to spend. Just like a homeowner who ignores a small leak in the roof or a crack in a foundation, we can expect our nation’s infrastructure to steadily worsen until something suddenly gives way. The choice is simple: Pay up now when things are still fixable or wait until disaster strikes and the cost of rebuilding will Theunis Bates be that much higher. Managing editor