Tag Archives: infrastructure

ASCE 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure

The American Society of Civil Engineers (of which I am a member) has released their every-four-years assessment of U.S. infrastructure. Why every four years? Once per presidential cycle I assume, and maybe they aim for about a year after the election to avoid being overly political? Because the goal here is to influence policy and keep the taps flowing with money for infrastructure projects that engineers will work on. It’s a lobbying group and it’s a big business, but nonetheless they try to be objective and infrastructure investment is needed.

The “letter grades” thing is kind of a gimmick, but an effective one I think for getting headlines and communicating with the media and the political class. Then there is more detailed information that interested people, or hopefully people who might be drafting future legislation, can dig into. What is most interesting to me personally is the references.

Anyway, to summarize, the Biden infrastructure spending is slowly working its way through the system and this has resulted in some improvement. I think this is Biden’s true positive legacy, whether he eventually gets any credit for it or not. But the report comes across as pleading for the country to sustain the slightly increased momentum created by the Biden-era funding bill. In my ideal world, infrastructure wouldn’t be funded by One Big Bill once a generation, but continuously as it is needed. And the way for the federal and state governments to do it, I have always thought, would be in a counter-cyclical manner during recessions. Planning should be regional in nature, with local projects that are consistent with long-term planning goals ready to go as funding becomes available. Some funding should be local, because the local community needs skin in the game. Federal and state governments could then match this local investment at a higher or lower level depending on what is happening in the economy. And there needs to be money for the full life cycle including maintenance/repair/upgrade/replacement, not just for new construction. And that is my personal broken-record infrastructure rant from this one civil engineer, thank you for listening.

building public transit faster and cheaper

Haden Clarkin, in a blog called The Transit Guy offers a “four step playbook” for building public transportation infrastructure in the United States. I’ll summarize and offer a few of my own reactions in brackets.

  • Develop a comprehensive vision, goals, and plan. [Yes, a lot of times people – especially my fellow engineers but also politicians trying to be helpful with funding – want to jump directly to “projects”. A “project” is a specific thing you want to build in a specific place. But it needs to be part of a larger plan to serve a larger purpose in the long term. This planning needs to be firmly in place when the “project” ideas come up and people are pushing for quick decisions on them. And you need a critical mass of people inside the organizations making the decisions, from senior management down to at least mid-level management, to really understand and buy into the plan. And you need to bring new people on board with the plan as you gradually lose institutional knowledge to political churn and attrition.]
  • Approve the plan through a voter referendum. In Haden’s vision, this cuts through a lot of the regulatory red tape later, because all the regulatory requirements tend to have extensive public buy-in and outreach requirements. A state-level referendum may also cut through some of localized NIMBY issues. [He’s writing in Rhode Island, and this may work there. We don’t really have state-level referenda in Pennsylvania, and I assume there is probably some constitutional reason for this. There are mechanisms for updating the constitution, and maybe we should work on this. We do have a big urban-rural divide issue in the state though, like many larger states. This might make it difficult to pass a state-level referendum focused on a metro area. It may be worth a try though.]
  • “Design and Plan it In-House”. [This is consultant hate. I happen to be a consultant who has worked with and been embedded within public agencies, and I think this is hogwash. Well, mostly hogwash. Sometimes public sector people mistakenly compare the hourly direct labor cost for their own people to the hourly cost of labor+benefits+overhead+profit of private sector consultants. Yes, there is a small profit in there, theoretically set by market competition. Competition for public-sector contracts is pretty ferocious, at least outside of the military-industrial complex. The true overhead and benefits cost to the public sector is often hard to define, but if you do an honest accounting of it, it is almost certainly higher than the private sector. Now, you want a public agency firmly in control of design, procurement, and construction of its projects. So it probably makes sense to set some benchmark like the majority of people working on a project should work for the public agency. But then it can make a lot of sense to bring in consultants both for their expertise and because they are a flexible work force you can surge in when needed and then scale back when no longer needed. You let them deal with those overhead and benefit costs so they don’t get out of control on the public side. You want strong technical people on the public side of course, but it is also really important to focus on strong project management, procurement, finance and accounting, and construction management expertise so you can make the best use of the private sector.]
  • Prioritize high impact and publicly visible projects first. [This makes total sense. I especially like the idea of building bus rapid transit lines early and converting them to light rail or even subway over time.]

There’s lots more, of course. Land use, housing, and zoning policy all play a role in building communities where there will actually be demand and support for public transportation. You probably need metro-scale and often multi-state authorities for design, construction, operation, and financing. That is big picture, long term context for the planning process. In my fantasy world, we wouldn’t just have a transportation plan for one municipality, but a comprehensive infrastructure plan (how about transportation, energy, water, communications, green infrastructure and food) at the metropolitan area scale.

Biden and the “shovel ready” problem

This Politico article from May 2024 does a good job summarizing Biden’s legislative achievements and then gets into a central problem that seems to be facing our country in recent decades – implementation is very, very hard. And because it is very hard, politicians who promise they can deliver substantive, tangible results often have trouble demonstrating clearly that they have delivered what they promised.

Now, I think Biden was a great president with substantial accomplishments, for about three years. I think his legacy, unfortunately, is likely to be determined by that last year. He should have announced in early 2023 that he was going to retire gracefully at the end of his first term, and allowed a full Democratic Party primary to play out. If that had happened, maybe we would be exactly where we are today, after a Kamala Harris nomination and close loss. And maybe we wouldn’t – maybe she would have nominated and run a more organized, successful campaign that reached an extra 2% of voters. Or maybe a more dynamic leader would have emerged. Anyway, that is not what happened here in this particular universe which is real as far as we can tell. So let’s talk Biden.

Biden had four major legislative accomplishments. The dollar figures below include what was appropriated (approved/required to be spent) by Congress plus tax breaks:

  1. the 2021 pandemic relief package (“American Rescue Plan”) – $45 billion
  2. the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure investment law (aka the “no catchy name” act?) – about $840 billion
  3. the 2022 “CHIPS and Science Act” – maybe $60-70 billion? (Politico has done a decent job laying out the numbers in graphics and text but it is still not perfectly clear)
  4. the 2022 climate and energy-focused “Inflation Reduction Act” – about $500 billion, largely through tax breaks?

The Politico article paints a picture of Biden being frustrated after he expected to spend the last couple years of his term at ribbon cuttings taking full political credit for accomplishments produced by these bills. I think a few things have happened here.

First, implementation is slow. Realistically, investing a trillion dollars productively is going to take time, and it is probably good for it to take time. Good investments require planning, and planning takes time. Well planned, slow and steady investments in infrastructure, research and development, and manufacturing capacity seem like a great idea to me in the real economic world. In my rationally planned infrastructure fantasy world, well-thought-out, frequently updated comprehensive plans would exist at the metropolitan area scale with construction projects queued up for bid as soon as funding can be found. The real world is not like this, but an idealistic vision can provide a direction to steer our ship. Funding would come more from the private sector when unemployment is low, and more from the government when unemployment ticks up and private credit is tight. There also has to be money and a plan for operation and maintenance of whatever is built, which is also politically unsexy. All of this could be legislated, but it would have to be done in advance as an automated rule, rather than requiring Congress to react in real time to the business cycle, which it can’t do.

Second, implementation is hard, and it seems to be harder in our country than it needs to be. There is a lot of debate on the reasons, but it is some combination of labor cost/scarcity, capacity/competence of domestic firms and workers, lack of competition, slow productivity growth in certain industries (particularly construction), and corruption. There are policy options to address all of these, but either they are politically inconvenient (like more visas for guest workers or allowing foreign firms greater access to our markets) or our politicians don’t understand them.

Third, at least some slow and steady implementation definitely happened, and Biden had trouble taking political credit for it. A November 2024 NPR article talked about this. The ribbon cutting press release strategy just didn’t get much media attention at a time when the public was more focused on disappearing household disposable incomes. Arguably, maybe, the administration wasn’t savvy enough with modern communication styles and tools to get the public’s fragmented attention. Or more ominously, maybe the public’s attention is so fragmented it can’t be gotten with any kind of rational, positive message. I am also thinking back to the 2021 stimulus, when my household disposable income definitely increased due to the stimulus package. This was done so quietly and invisibly as a tax credit directly to my bank account (which I had used to pay my taxes electronically), I barely noticed it. This was economic brilliance at a time when people really needed the help, and it may have saved our country. Politically, maybe the Democrats should have had party operatives knocking on my door and handing me a check. Or maybe they should have done that with some randomly chosen fraction of people and made sure they had the media in tow.

A final thought – since implementation is hard and slow, a lot of Trump’s agenda is trying to throw up obstacles to implementation of Biden’s trillion dollars. He will probably thwart some but not all of it. So Biden’s positive legacy will continue to play out.

cities need to take over sidewalks

This article is about Denver taking over responsibility for sidewalks, rather than just putting this burden on private property owners. Sidewalks may seem like a wonky fringe issue but they are a big key to being able to implement green infrastructure effectively in cities. There are a few reasons for this. First, they are where the street trees are going to be, and street trees are a big part of the solution to urban heat and a smaller but significant part of the solution to water quality and flooding. Second, streets and sidewalks together make up a surprising portion (I’ve estimated around 40% in my city) of the pavement in a city. Curb and storm inlet design are key to how well and how fast all this pavement drains. This is because the sidewalk is attached to the curb, and the curb is attached to the gutter, and the gutter is attached to the inlet that drains the street – pretty obvious when you think about it right? But when private owners are responsible for sidewalks, those curbs that are so critical to channeling the water often aren’t built and maintained right. Finally, depending on how wide sidewalks are, they often are where there may be room for rain gardens and pollinator gardens, for cities and neighborhoods that want these things (most do in the abstract, but there has to be a good plan for taking care of them long term and they need to not be in the way.)

That’s the environment – obviously sidewalks are where people walk, roll on wheelchairs, push baby strollers, and hobble on crutches. Sometimes people ride bikes on them, particularly children and particularly when there are not safe or adequately maintained bike lanes. They need to be in good condition for all these people.

Speaking of bike lanes, then there is the whole world of bike lanes (which we should probably think of as light low-speed vehicle lanes), curb management, bus stops, delivery and contractor zones, taxi and ride share stands, street parking, and electric vehicle charging, not to mention all the other “street furniture” like trash cans, bike racks, and mailboxes. Design and maintenance of the sidewalk and curb impacts all these public uses and it makes no sense to put that burden on private landowners.

So where did Denver find the money to take on this new responsibility? Well, they are charging the private landowners by bundling the cost into an existing stormwater management fee. This makes sense because ultimately the city including the homeowners will get better and more cost-effective public infrastructure. But of course, I am well aware of the political law of gravity that PEOPLE HATE TAXES. No, I don’t have an easy answer on how to solve this one. Another thing people really hate though is the local code enforcement agency coming down on residential and small business owners on a piecemeal basis, especially for what many logically view as public infrastructure. So to summarize, there are three options – (1) enforce sidewalk codes on private property owners, (2) leave sidewalk codes unenforced and sidewalks in poor condition, except for maybe a few piecemeal complaint-driven enforcement actions, or (3) raise revenue through taxes or fees so the same public agencies maintaining the streets can maintain the sidewalks.

I’ll mention one final wrinkle though. Under sidewalks, there is typically a tangle of water pipes, sewer pipes, natural gas lines, and sometimes buried electric/communications lines that connect houses to public infrastructure under the street. So if a city “takes over the sidewalks”, it has to also figure out if it going to consider all this public or private infrastructure. For example, if a water pipe connecting the main under the street to a house is private, and the sidewalk is public, and that water pipe springs a leak, the sidewalk has to get dug up to replace the water pipe, and then the sidewalk has to get replaced. So it has to be clear who ends up paying for that or whether the cost will be shared. One thing homeowners hate and fear probably even more than taxes (me included) is large unexpected expenses.

Ha ha, did I say I was going to do some short posts?

sidewalks

Sidewalks are important. Besides being (obviously?) part of the transportation system (because the purpose of a transportation system is to move people and goods from point A to point B, NOT to move your private motor vehicle from point A to point B), we can put trees in them, manage water and pollution in them, move water/electricity/gas/communications under them and over them, conduct business and engage in social interactions in them. In engineering lingo, they are part of the “public right of way” along with the street. This is why most U.S. cities recognize that they are a critical part of the urban public infrastructure…wait, what? They don’t? They pretend they are private property and put the onus on private property owners to keep them in a state that provides all these public amenities. The article I link to here compares sidewalk policy in U.S. cities and concludes that some are better than others.

October 2024 in Review

Only half way through November – here is an “October in Review” post.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: When it comes to the #1 climate change impact on ordinary people, it’s the food stupid. (Dear reader, I’m not calling you stupid, and I don’t consider myself stupid, but somehow we individually intelligent humans are all managing to be stupid together.) This is the shit that is probably going to hit the fan first while we are shouting stupid slogans like “drill baby drill” (okay, if you are cheering when you hear a politician shout that you might not be stupid, but you are at least uninformed.)

Most hopeful story: AI, at least in theory, should be able to help us manage physical assets like buildings and infrastructure more efficiently. Humans still need to have some up-front vision of what we would like our infrastructure systems to look like in the long term, but then AI should be able to help us make optimal repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions that nudge the system toward the vision over time as individual components wear out.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Some explanations proposed for the very high cost of building infrastructure in the U.S. are (1) lack of competition in the construction industry and (2) political fragmentation leading to many relatively small agencies doing many relatively small projects. Some logical solutions then are to encourage the formation of more firms in the U.S., allow foreign firms and foreign workers to compete (hardly consistent with the current political climate!), and consolidate projects into a smaller number of much larger ones where economies of scale can be realized. There is some tension though between scale and competition, because the larger and more complex a project gets, the fewer bidders it will tend to attract who are willing to take the risk.

Tokyo train stations

I have never been to Tokyo, unfortunately. I had a trip planned there in 2011, but the earthquake and nuclear meltdown that year intervened. My condolences to everyone who lost loved ones or was otherwise directly impacted by that event, and I am not suggesting the minor disruption to my vacation plans that year was comparatively important.

Anyway, I was looking forward to seeing Tokyo firsthand and I didn’t get to. But I guess pictures are the next best thing. This article has some nice pictures of railway stations. Now, I spent some time in Singapore recently, and the railway stations there are pretty new and very modern looking. The first thing that strikes me about these Tokyo stations is they are not brand new, and they look pretty similar to older train stations here in the U.S. But the comparison ends there, because they are clean, well maintained, the service is reliable and the population is proud of their public transportation system. I also note that these older stations have been successfully retrofit with barriers so that people can’t fall/be pushed/intentionally jump onto the tracks and die. In the United States, at least here in my home city of Philadelphia, we “can’t afford” these barriers. Meaning of course that human life is not worth enough to us to make this a priority compared to other things we spend enormous amounts of money on, like highways and bombs.

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b11302/
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b11302/

AI and asset management

This article is about AI and predictive building maintenance. It also reads like an IBM corporate press release, but nonetheless it sparks some interesting thoughts. Recently I was at a conference where a friend of mine was on stage and as asked what technologies would be most important for the future of public infrastructure (water infrastructure, in the case of this particular conference.) AI and asset management came to my mind, and I willed my friend to also think of this. Alas, he did not. Now, if I had been up there would I have been able to articulate my thoughts clearly on the spot? Probably not, but with the benefit of a few minutes to think here is what I fantasize I might have said.

Basically, AI should be pretty good at asset management. Given good data on assets and their ages, they should be able to identifying assets (we’re talking physical assets here, like pipes or electrical equipment, or even green infrastructure like street trees) that are nearing the end of their service life and likely to fail in the engineering sense of no longer serving their intended purpose efficiently. Or, somewhat obviously, when things really have failed AI can help get that information to the attention of whoever can actually do something about it. Well, I still think humans have to do the up-front planning and have some vision for what they would like the infrastructure system to look like 20, 30, 50 years down the line. But then, AI should really be able to help with those repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions, so that as things wear out the system is slowly nudged in the direction of that long-term vision, all while minimizing life cycle cost and balancing whatever other objectives the owners or stakeholders might have. This all looks good on paper and is messy to do with a mish-mash of real-world governments and institutions and companies, but having the vision is a start.

high, high, highway construction costs

U.S. infrastructure construction cost woes stem largely from lack of competition in the construction industry and diseconomies of scale among public agencies procuring the work. I think I am using the latter term right. Very large agencies and projects are going to get better deals than smaller ones. This is somewhat of an iron law of economics, but you might be able to get around it somewhat by bundling smaller projects into larger packages and by getting larger agencies (like the federal government) more directly involved.

The former (lack of competition) is tricky. Architecture, engineering, and construction is generally not a high-profit industry, and it is a pretty high-risk industry. This all pushes towards a few large firms bidding on large projects where they can make a few pennies on a large volume. The construction industry just hasn’t made much in the way of productivity gains in the last half century either, while labor costs have been rising.

You could help solve the competition problem by allowing foreign firms in, and you could help solve the labor cost problem (from the contractors’ point of view) by letting foreign workers in. Both of these things are politically tough in the U.S.

This article in the blog Boondoggle does a pretty good job of summarizing the report in an understandable way, but it also attacks “high price consultants”. Being part of the engineering consultant industry for many years, I feel a need to push back on this a bit. Labor costs at these firms are high too, profit margins are also pretty slim, and there actually is a lot a competition in this industry. When public agencies hire a consulting firm, the price they see includes everything – the actual product of course and the employees’ salaries, but also all the employee benefits, project management, administrative, financial, and legal costs the firm has to bear, plus the taxes it has to pay. Finally, yes, a few pennies of profit on top of all that, and some money spent on marketing to the next batch of customers. When portions of a project are subcontracted, all those administrative costs get repeated at each level of the food chain. So yes, this adds of to a lot of administrative costs, and it would be great to trim them (maybe some hope for AI on this one longer term?), but the fact is that if the public agency tries to do the work with their own staff, they have almost all of these same costs, and they are typically going to be significantly higher. But people often compare only the labor and construction cost borne by the public agency to the entire cost of business borne by the private firm, which is not a fair comparison. And especially at smaller public agencies, they just aren’t going to have the capacity or expertise to do all the work in-house, which is exactly the gap the consulting industry has sprung up to fill.

So to summarize, here are some ideas:

  • Allow foreign firms and foreign workers to participate, especially in industries where it is clear competition is limited and skilled labor supply is tight. You could also try to train and equip more Americans with the skills needed and encourage formation of more firms, in theory.
  • Aggregate smaller projects and public agencies into larger ones to make them more attractive for firms to bid on. Get larger state and federal agencies involved in the procurement process where possible.
  • Turn on the research and development funding fire hose to make progress on the construction productivity problem. AI, materials science, and prefabrication of more components are all ideas being bandied about. This also gets money into the academic and research institutions which creates skills and capacity for our society.
  • Do I even need to say this? Have government provide health care and other benefits other countries are providing their citizens, and relieve this burden on our private firms so they can focus on doing whatever it is they are in business to do.

New York to Boston in 100 minutes?

I’ve taken Amtrak from New York to Boston. It takes about four hours, and is more or less the best the United States has to offer when it comes to passenger rail connecting major population centers. I live in Philadelphia, which along with New York and Boston, built some of the world’s first subway systems very early in the 20th century (trivia answer: even earlier subways were London, which people might guess, and Budapest, which they might not.) Before World War II, Philadelphia had an ambitious plan on paper to build out its subway system. It never happened – today, we have two dirty, old, and unreliable subway lines connecting a fraction of our city, and we are lucky to have what we have compared to most U.S. cities. I also lived in Singapore from 2010-2013. Singapore is not a utopia in every way, despite what their highly effective government propaganda might suggest, but in terms of public infrastructure and particularly transportation infrastructure, it was astonishing at the time. Well, no longer. After visiting Singapore this week for the first time since I left in 2013, it has gone from astonishing to science fiction. They have nearly doubled the size of their system in the time since I left. But what gave me this sense of science fiction is simply a decade of progress in another part of the world, while the United States has been more or less standing still. We are simply not an advanced country in comparison, and the gap is growing.

What do I think Singapore’s secret is? Not some secret high-tech technology. They nurture domestic industry to some extent, while purposely exposing them to competition from foreign competitors. When I was here as an engineering consultant a decade ago, the subway lines under construction were being managed by a German firm and a South Korean firm, which were in turn managed by the state transit agency, the Land Transportation Authority. The other secret is low-cost labor from developing countries. The Singapore-born population is shrinking, so they focus on educating their population for high value-added careers and allow in motivated and willing migrant workers to do the lower-tech stuff. This entails long hours of hard work in the tropical sun, but in Singapore at least labor and environmental standards are pretty reasonable (you can compare their construction site accident data to ours for example and it is very favorable to them, unless you believe there is some cover up. Middle Eastern countries may be a different story however.)

So the moral of the story here is that coddling inefficient domestic U.S. firms and high-cost U.S. labor to build our infrastructure is going to limit what we can accomplish. The winners will be some subset of domestic firms and workers, while the losers are everyone and the entire economy that would benefit from frictionless infrastructure. In a rational world, we might let in efficient foreign firms and low-cost foreign workers, boost our economy, institute a value-added tax, and use the proceeds to education our next generation and anyone in this generation left behind because we brought in the foreign workers. But our politics are clearly not headed in this direction.

Interestingly, the American Society of Civil Engineers has a new video called “Cities of the Future”, which largely showcases Singapore.