Why infrastructure spending is not as simple as it seems
In a deeply divided America, infrastructure investment appears to be a rare area of political consensus. Donald Trump called for a major road-and-bridge program in his victory speech. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—opposed to nearly everything else for which Trump stands—has promised to “work together to quickly pass a robust infrastructure jobs bill.” Most Americans seem to want infrastructure, as well. Surveys from Gallup and Public Policy Polling have found more than 70 percent of Americans favor increased spending on roads, bridges, rail, and the like.
But for all this apparent consensus, there is little evidence of an obvious infrastructure crisis, much less a clear solution. The piece of evidence most often cited to establish the need for more investment in major civil-engineering programs comes from a series of increasingly dire report cards issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers, but they can hardly be called an objective party. In fact, the bulk of the evidence shows America’s infrastructure is getting better.
The average time it takes Americans to get to work fell over the first decade of the 2000s, after decades of rising commute times. Average American commutes are now statistically tied with those of their Canadian brethren for the shortest in the G7, even though both countries have lower population densities than the other five G7 members. The percentage of highway miles considered in “poor” condition has declined steadily over the past decade. Road deaths per-capita have fallen by nearly a third over the past two decades, despite ticking upward in recent years. More people died from lightning strikes during the summer of 2016 (31) than have died in maintenance-related bridge collapses since 2000 (13).
No matter how much the president complains about the condition of American airports, airlines have improved their on-time performance steadily. In the first 10 months of 2016 (the most recent data available), about 81 percent of flights arrived on time, compared with a little under 76 percent in the same period of 2006. Where there are real high-profile infrastructure problems, they tend to be local ones. Large parts of New York’s LaGuardia Airport are decrepit, although the airport already is in the process of a hugely expensive renovation. Washington’s Metrorail system has an enormous maintenance backlog, while urban rail systems in Chicago and New York are in better shape than they were a quarter-century ago.
With no obvious priority crying out for investment now—but lots of areas making cases that they need a new road, rail line, or bridge—Trump and Congress easily could agree on a package similar to President Barack Obama’s misbegotten 2009 stimulus. That plan threw a bit over $100 billion at a variety of infrastructure purposes, ranging from highways and bridges ($27.5 billion) to upgrading federally owned power networks ($6.5 billion) to broadband Internet access ($7.2 billion). Unsurprisingly, this scattershot approach made few noticeable improvements in most Americans’ lives. At best, the stimulus was simply a way to reduce unemployment and prime the economic pump, and some economists don’t think it even did that. And if such pump-priming made sense when the unemployment rate approached 10 percent, it’s far more difficult to justify when unemployment rate is flirting with 10-year lows.
History shows that transformative public infrastructure projects tend to spring from audacious and usually controversial visions, not abstract plans to “invest” or “help the economy.” Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party of the mid-19th century supported building a transcontinental railroad because it opened land for Europeans to move westward, created manufacturing jobs in the North, and reduced America’s reliance on the products of the South’s slave economy. Dwight Eisenhower’s plan for the Interstate Highway System was designed to help the auto industry, increase home ownership, replace multilevel factories with more efficient single-level designs, and provide a way to move troops quickly in case of Soviet invasion.
To have a tangible impact, such projects must be conducted on a massive scale. A new 100-mile interstate highway won’t create much demand for new cars or spur the development of entirely new ways of working and shopping, but 47,000 miles did. At the height of their construction, both the transcontinental railroad and the Interstate Highway System consumed more than one percent of gross domestic product. That’s why it would be nearly impossible to do more than one such project at a time. A transformative infrastructure plan is an all-or-nothing proposition.
What is certain about such projects is that they inevitably raise questions about fundamental values. They help some groups and hurt others. For example, Japan’s impressive high-speed Shinkansen trains created a certain type of urban culture and subsidized the politically powerful construction industry while preserving countryside and small farms. Even if they haven’t made that country’s economy boom, the Shinkansen lines have become a Japanese cultural touchstone. Building major infrastructure projects on a similar scale is a value-laden decision that inevitably means picking sides, and thus undoes the much-vaunted consensus.
Massive new investment in American roads would damage the economies of some large cities by making it easier for people to commute to downtown areas while scaring them with freeway off-ramps; would make it easier for middle-income families to afford houses big enough for more children; would increase pollution from automobile use; would reduce the amount of land preserved as parks; and would cut mass transit ridership. Significant spending on energy infrastructure could help cut pollution and reduce energy costs, but would accelerate the already-terminal decline of the coal industry and could, if it encouraged people to switch to electric cars, disrupt the gasoline-dependent auto industry, as well. The passenger rail investment plans favored by many on the left likely would increase the vitality of some urban centers, reduce automobile use, cut pollution, and draw people away from already declining rural and small-town areas into urban centers.
All of these potential investment choices, and the trade-offs they require, rightfully would foment immense political controversy. There’s no effective way to invest in “infrastructure” as an abstract concept except arguably as “stimulus.” Any major infrastructure investment is going to involve inherently political questions.
Image by Alexey Savchuk
