On August 1, 2007, during the evening rush hour, the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The bridge's collapse symbolized, critics said, the sad state of the country's quickly crumbling roads and bridges, illustrating the need for massive new investments in infrastructure projects.
Whether the Minnesota bridge catastrophe was truly symptomatic of systemic failure or simply an unfortunate but relatively isolated incident, however, remains up for debate. In fact, once one looks past the politics of infrastructure investment to the hard data, there's reason to believe the latter.
The American Society of Civil Engineers, a professional organization for engineers who design, build and maintain public works projects such as roads and bridges, has been one of the loudest voices in that debate. In January 2009, just in time for Congress to vote on its stimulus package, the ASCE gave the country's infrastructure a "D" grade overall, a "C" for bridges and a dismal "D-" for roads in its national infrastructure report card.
Their message hit home. President Obama cited the ASCE report card last March when he announced $29 billion in new outlays for roads and bridges passed under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pushing total spending to $351.5 billion over five years. Even after those funds were announced, the ASCE called for an additional $1.176 trillion investment in infrastructure over the next five years across all infrastructure categories, including areas such as public transit and drinking water facilities, for a total investment of $2.2 trillion. And it called for that largest portion of that investment, $949 billion, to be set aside for roads and bridges, including $549.5 billion beyond budgeted and stimulus spending.
But is the nation's infrastructure really "failing," as the ASCE claims in its government relations literature? Headline-grabbing catastrophes aside, both long-term trends in road and bridge quality and highway accident rates suggest that the ASCE's low overall grades for the nation's infrastructure may stand on an unstable foundation.
After all, the ASCE is a professional association of civil engineers, funded largely by civil engineers, to advance to interests of civil engineers. Its members both depend on government infrastructure contracts for their paychecks and give the ASCE the bulk of its financial support. The ASCE’s largest source of funding is membership dues, according to its 2007 annual report, followed by publication sales and conferences and seminars, most of which it gears toward an audience of civil engineers.
What do the objective data show? As the ASCE and other infrastructure critics note, traffic congestion does indeed remain a persistent problem, especially in urbanized areas. U.S. travelers wasted 4.2 billion hours stuck in traffic in 2007, equivalent to one full work-week per traveler, and wasted 2.8 billion gallons of fuel, or three week's worth of gas for every traveler, according to the Texas Transportation Institute's 2009 Urban Mobility Report. This resulted in a total cost in wasted fuel and lost productivity of $87.2 billion, or more than $750 for every traveler. After rising for more than two decades, however, these figures have leveled off in recent years. The average U.S. traveler wasted one less hour stuck in traffic in 2007 than he did the year before, and wasted one less gallon of gas.
