Tag Archives: infrastructure

July 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.

automatic fiscal stabilizers

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This doesn’t sound like an exciting topic, but I have been thinking, if the federal government decided to match metro-scale infrastructure projects say, between 25 cents and 75 cents on the dollar, and vary that amount based on economic conditions, what kind of trigger would you use for the economic conditions. My initial thought is to base it on unemployment – maybe 25 cents on the dollar if unemployment is below 5%, 50 cents if it is 5-7%, and 75 cents if it goes over 7%. But I just made that up based on no data other than a vaguely remembered undergraduate economics class in the 1990s. Here is a serious idea called the Sahm indicator:

The “Sahm indicator” measures the difference between the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate and its minimum over the prior 12 months (see chart). The use of the unemployment rate avoids the long lags (and frequent large revisions) associated with other indicators (like GDP). Since 1970, whenever the Sahm indicator crossed the threshold of 0.5%, a recession was underway―there were essentially no false signals. Moreover, the trigger occurred early in these downturns (on average within 4 months of the start). Sahm also proposes using an unemployment rate test to turn the stabilizers off. To avoid a premature return to fiscal austerity, she suggests deactivating programs when the unemployment rate falls to a level that is less than 2 percentage points above the initial trigger.

The infrastructure projects have to be ready to go, and part of plans, not just projects. Maybe you could set aside some of the money in a maintenance trust fund, which gets released to local metropolitan area governments to give them some relief in tough times. Maybe federal or state workers could be trained to do basic maintenance tasks. This is really the issue we saw after the 2007-2008 recession – how do you get people hired and trained and contracts and construction plans all in place fast enough to make a difference economically. It’s hard to do that and still build smart, thoughtful, future-ready infrastructure. But catching up on unglamourous deferred maintenance – think fixing potholes, lining leaky pipes, etc. could make sense.

is the U.S. becoming a developing country?

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This Bloomberg article has a list of areas where the U.S. is following behind its peer group of developing nations.

  • roads, highways, bridges
  • high construction costs for all types of infrastructure, particularly high speed rail causing planned projects to be canceled
  • health care costs and outcomes
  • life expectancy
  • maternal mortality
  • rents rising faster than inflation
  • opioid addiction
  • suicide
  • lead in drinking water
  • poverty and hunger

The article offers the cautionary tale of Italy, which has been sliding backward over a decade or so following many years of similarly flashing warning lights before that.

April 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.

New Orleans levees are upgraded, but did not take climate change into account

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A $14 billion upgrade to New Orleans’s flood protection system has been completed, as recommended following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For the U.S., this is a pretty massive and fast public works project. I haven’t delved into any technical details and am only going on this Scientific American article, but it sounds like it will not provide the level of protection originally envisioned.

The agency’s projection that the system will “no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023” illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana….

Sea-level rise raises questions about whether the protective system—known officially as the Greater New Orleans Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System—should be built to a higher standard.
When Congress approved funding after Katrina, it required the system to protect against a so-called 100-year flood, which has a 1% likelihood of occurring in any year.

That’s a laudable attempt to communicate probability to the public. But if the Army Corps is really using the “100-year flood” as its design standard, and if it’s doing that because Congress prescribed it, and if they did not consider coastal erosion or adequately consider sea level rise, this may be yet another sign the U.S. is slipping behind its peer group of advanced nations. The Dutch are not doing this, they are providing a much higher level of protection to coastal population centers based on the economic value of doing so. I want to believe Congress will do the right thing and protect our coastal population centers when push comes to shove, but I am not encouraged.

Of course, if it protects from a 1-chance-in-50 event rather than a 1-chance-in-100 event, this is not nothing. Each year, and over the course of several decades or a century, your city and personal property either floods or it doesn’t. When it does, you either have practical and financial plans in place to help you bounce back, or you don’t. So good planning, good public works design, good building codes and land use controls, insurance and disaster resilience planning all matter. Some academics, professionals and bureaucrats within the U.S. might be talking about these things, but our political system is certainly not on the cutting edge when it comes to putting them into practice.

urban planning trends to watch in 2019

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This one is from Planetizen. One interesting point is the role that (lack of) land use regulation has played in bringing the climate crisis about, and how that is not really part of the conversation at the federal level, but maybe could be.

The Green New Deal also provides the latest example of the lack of understanding about the role of land use regulations in housing affordability and climate change. So far, the Green New Deal lacks any specific land use regulation suggestions. Planners realize land use regulations can be a key tool in mitigating climate change, achieving environmental sustainability, and encouraging shared economic prosperity. Getting land use wrong, however, is how we ended up in the current crisis…

After programs like the interstate highway system, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and the federal Property Tax Exemption created some of the most egregious environmental and social justice mistakes of the 20th century, taking the federal government out of the equation now threatens to cement the legacy of these errors for perpetuity…

In 2019, climate change action, and questions about the effectiveness of future climate change action, must be measured in urban growth boundaries, flood insurance maps, and reduced Vehicles Miles Traveled (VMT). Big talk and subsequent capitulation won’t suffice. (I’m reminded of the implementation of VMT as the legal metric of environmental impact in California, which buckled under pressure from the Southern California Association of Governments.) The built environment will eventually render the failures of compromise.

I do in fact remember Al Gore talking about suburban sprawl. And that is the last I remember a prominent politician talking about it. I don’t think anyone would want to see zoning regulation coming from the federal government. That is not how we do it. But the idea of tying federal funding to a comprehensive infrastructure plan at the metropolitan area sounds to me like it could work. We could think big and make it a lot of funding through an infrastructure bank that served a counter-cyclical function in the macroeconomy, and we could think even bigger by considering all forms of infrastructure from water to the food system to green infrastructure.

infrastructure decay like “hidden debt”?

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This article describes the U.S. lack of needed investment in infrastructure and (including maintenance) and renewable energy as a “hidden debt” that will come due. They liken it to not disclosing to a home buyer that your roof needs repairs, which if disclosed would reduce the expected selling price of the home. I don’t know about the accounting questions involved, but as a communication approach maybe this could work.

The federal government also has debt that has not been accounted for, and which one doesn’t often hear about. The debt that has been accounted for is the $15.6 trillionheld by the public in the form of US Treasury bonds. The debts that have not been accounted for include the deferred costs of maintenance on roads, water systems, and 54,560 structurally deficient bridges, as well as the yet-to-be-built low-carbon energy systems necessary to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change. And these are just two broad examples.

So, just how much hidden US debt is there? At this point, we must rely on rough estimates. For example, according to a 2016 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), upgrading the country’s crumbling infrastructure would cost $5.2 trillion. And, according to a 2014 International Energy Agency (IEA) report and our own calculations based on the US share of global CO2 emissions, transitioning to a clean-energy system will cost an additional $6.6 trillion. All told, that is $11.8 trillion in unaccounted-for non-inflation-adjusted liabilities.

subway construction cost

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A New York Times article has some stats on the cost of subway construction in New York City compared to elsewhere:

  • NYC: $2.5-3.5 billion per mile
  • Paris: $0.45 billion per mile
  • Madrid: $100 million per mile
  • San Francisco: $1 billion per mile
  • Seattle: $0.5 billion per mile

This particular article doesn’t cover costs in Asia. From my personal experience in Singapore, I know that low-cost “guest labor” is part of the equation there. And while environmental, health and safety regulations were relatively stringent there, that is certainly not the case everywhere. Still, nothing like that is going on in France or Spain to the best of my knowledge.

the Trump infrastructure bill

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The Trump infrastructure plan has apparently leaked. The upshot seems to be that states and metropolitan planning organizations, among others, can submit projects to be matched at up to 20% by the federal government. Most of the selection criteria are based on making a strong case that there is a plan to come up with the other 80%.

This sounds okay, as far as it goes, and it might get some projects over the hump that would not otherwise get built. I like the idea that metropolitan planning organizations are eligible, because they are in the best position to look at a city’s needs as a whole, across fragmented political entities and across types of infrastructure. Cities are where people live, where most of the economy happens and taxes are paid, and where people are educated and given skills and where new ideas come from that make our lives better in the long run. What I don’t really like is that economic and social benefits are given only 5% weight in the selection criteria. And even then, they are considered for an individual project in isolation, in the absence of any larger plan. In my ideal world, planning organizations would have comprehensive infrastructure plans that look at all types of infrastructure together over the long term, even including green infrastructure, and really focus on maximizing economic benefits. This would allow us to prioritize individual projects in the larger context of how the whole socioeconomic system works and not just on one “project at a time.

Still, this might be a small step in the right direction. Along with public infrastructure and some small steps to encourage capital investment, research and development in the private sector, add serious programs to address education, job skills training, and research and development in the public sector and you would have the beginnings of a long term national economic plan. Maybe toss in a revenue-neutral pollution tax for good measure.

the unraveling of complex systems

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This account of 96 terrible hours at JFK airport caused by terrible, but not unusually terrible, winter weather reminds us how unresilient our modern infrastructure systems can be, and how unresilient our under-maintained and investment-starved U.S. infrastructure is in particular.

By Sunday, after half a foot of snow, gale force winds, and three days of single-digit temperatures, JFK had set a new standard for air travel horrors: Travelers waited for hours or days for their flights, sitting on scavenged sheets of cardboard in their socks, fuming to nearby reporters and farflung Twitter followers. Outside, the scene was more apocalyptic. Aircraft crowded the tarmac, too many of them for the gates. Passengers were left in planes for as long as seven hours after landing. And that was a full day and a half after the cyclone bomb had dissipated.