On an ordinary day, you probably don’t think much about infrastructure. You twist a knob, and clean water flows from the tap. The daily commute is uneventful. Wires transmit electricity, powering everything from dialysis machines to Netflix.
The mechanisms that enable these wonders remain—for most of us—out of sight and out of mind.
But, in twenty-first-century America, that may be changing. There are the epic failures: drinking water poisoned by lead or algae; commuter train derailments; collapsing highway bridges and pedestrian walkways. And then there are the daily frustrations, including gridlocked traffic, power outages, and rising utility rates. These failures, big and small, illuminate the dire state of our nation’s infrastructure.
In 2017, U.S. infrastructure received a dismal “D+” in a quadrennial report card issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers. According to ASCE, we’ll need to spend $2 trillion over ten years to bring water, transportation, the electric grid, and other systems up to a passable “B.”
Consider the systems that deliver clean water to your tap. Many of those pipes and pumps date back to the Eisenhower Administration—or, in the case of some plumbing in Washington, D.C., to the era of the Civil War. There are some 240,000 water main breaks in the United States every year, which waste more than two trillion gallons of treated drinking water.
While infrastructure needs are growing, federal support has shrunk, aside from a brief flurry of spending funded by President Barack Obama’s stimulus package in 2009. The federal government’s share of capital spending on water infrastructure, for instance, fell from 63 percent in 1977 to just 9 percent in 2014.
In cities with aging water systems, utilities are raising rates to make up for declining federal investment. The lowest 20 percent of income earners now pay up to one-fifth of their monthly income on water. In Detroit, thousands of families had their water shut off in 2018 when they couldn’t keep up with skyrocketing bills.
In 2017, U.S. infrastructure received a dismal “D+” in a quadrennial report card issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Worse, estimates by the civil engineers organization do not factor in climate change, which is now upon us. As the world faces a ten-year deadline to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid catastrophic warming, the transportation and power sectors together account for nearly 60 percent of U.S. emissions. Every time a highway is widened or a new coal-fired power plant built, we are doubling down on fossil-fuel dependence—and locking in high emissions for decades to come. We need to replace or augment current systems with carbon-light alternatives.
At the same time, our infrastructure must be retooled to withstand the climate impacts that are now inevitable. Communities are confronting problems they’ve never seen before, like extreme heat in Montana, annual “500-year” rain events in Houston, and “sunny-day flooding” in Norfolk, Virginia, and Miami. The impacts of climate change are already straining the nation’s aging infrastructure, and the worst is yet to come—with low-income communities facing the harshest impacts. The Trump Administration nevertheless proposed a policy change that would exclude all climate considerations from infrastructure planning.
However, the challenges we face can be seen as opportunities. Reinventing infrastructure could reconfigure American life by heading off the worst climate impacts, while also spurring job growth. “If we do it the right way, if we pair investments with smart labor policies, we can create and sustain the kind of good, stable union jobs that we know this country sorely needs,” says Larry Willis, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department.
The federal government is key to transforming infrastructure because the scale of spending needed is on par with other massive federal undertakings, like continent-spanning railroads and highways, rural electrification—the original New Deal projects that succeeded because of forward-thinking leadership that galvanized the nation.
So, what would a progressive vision for infrastructure look like in 2020? Here are some guideposts.
For starters, every dollar spent on U.S. infrastructure must bend the arc of carbon emissions toward zero. On transportation, that means transforming our gas-guzzling car problem.
Most federal transportation spending now goes to surface roads through the Highway Trust Fund. But public transit is a much more energy-efficient way to get people from place to place. Notes Steven Higashide of TransitCenter, “A highway lane can carry about 2,000 people per hour per direction. Buses can carry four or five times that number. With rail, you can carry perhaps 25,000 people per hour.”
While it’s important to keep existing roads and bridges in good repair, a climate-smart transportation policy would “stop widening highways,” says Christof Spieler of the design firm Huitt-Zollars. Numerous studies have shown that added highway capacity simply leads to more driving, along with more congestion and emissions.
“A single highway project is often measured in the billions of dollars,” Spieler says. “You can buy a lot of bus shelters for a billion dollars.” He advocates a much stronger intercity bus and rail network, coordinated and partially funded by the federal government. Spieler adds that by fully taxing trucks for their impact on highways, we could spur a rapid shift to freight rail.
In the power sector, the challenge is to complete the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, while radically improving the energy efficiency of our built environment.
Given decades of inequitable funding for everything from transit to broadband, a progressive infrastructure plan must prioritize spending in underinvested communities, both to improve services and to create economic opportunity.
The good news is that cheap, clean renewables are ascendant, while dirty coal-powered plants are being phased out. The price of renewables has fallen dramatically over the last decade, while game-changing battery storage provides steady power when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Still, thanks to the fracking boom and the enduring power of the oil and gas industry, the United States still gets 63 percent of its power from fossil fuels.
In the power sector, the federal government plays a lesser role, since most Americans get their electricity from investor-owned utilities. But the government could help speed the clean-energy transition by funding research, development, and pilot projects, and through tax credits and incentives, as the Obama Administration did to improve the energy efficiency of the nation’s building stock. At the very least, the federal government could stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $20 billion a year, undercutting state-level efforts to promote clean energy.
The power sector must also transform to withstand the hotter, wilder weather of the future. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy left eight million homes in the dark—some for as long as a month—and last year, a Californian utility shut off power to hundreds of thousands of customers to avoid sparking wildfires. Our vast, sprawling power grid is so interconnected that an overgrown tree in Ohio can take out power for fifty million people along the East Coast.
According to Denise Fairchild of Emerald Cities Collaborative, a resilient power system includes distributed renewable technologies, such as solar, plus battery storage and microgrids that can keep the lights on in a crisis. The federal government could help states and localities by funding research and innovation to ensure that these technologies are affordable, accessible, and appropriate—especially for vulnerable communities.
Meanwhile, water-treatment facilities are typically built in the lowest-lying parts of communities, where they are vulnerable to sea-level rise and storm surges; these must be fortified with flood walls and backup power. The water sector, says Scott Berry of the U.S. Water Alliance, “needs to plan for a future that looks climatologically different from the one that we have right now. The management of water is going to be critical in adapting and building resilience.”
In some cases, nature is the most resilient infrastructure. Forests and wetlands absorb floods and filter drinking water; dunes and mangroves block storm surges. Protecting or restoring these natural services can be cheaper and more effective than trying to replace them with pipes and concrete. The federal government can help promote “green infrastructure,” such as protected areas, parks, and rain gardens for stormwater management and flood prevention. And it can tackle the perverse incentives that spur unchecked development in floodplains.
Given decades of inequitable funding for everything from transit to broadband, a progressive infrastructure plan must prioritize spending in underinvested communities, both to improve services and to create economic opportunity. And it can create a more equitable future by tying federal spending to workers’ wages and benefits, labor rights, and community involvement.
“There’s got to be an equity plan so those communities most impacted are receiving the first dollars out,” says Fairchild. “And we need a collaborative planning process, where communities are at the table with the public planners and private developers.”
Investing in the right kinds of infrastructure can have far-reaching benefits. For example, a decentralized power-generation system could bring jobs and investment to communities that have been sacrificed to fossil fuels, from the ravaged mountain towns of Appalachia to the urban neighborhoods overshadowed by power plants and refineries.
Addressing the transit gap in low-income areas would have similarly transformative effects. A groundbreaking study by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard University found that low-income families in counties with the longest average commute times had the slimmest chance of moving up the economic ladder. Connecting marginalized communities to jobs and opportunity is essential to closing the chasm between America’s rich and poor.
And while investing in transformative change, the federal government must relieve the heavy burden of utility costs on low-income families. It can create programs to help poor people pay for essential water and power, similar to those now in place for food and heat.
Trump’s ill-fated 2018 infrastructure plan offered just $200 billion in federal funds; the remaining $1.3 trillion was expected to come from private investors, states, and localities. But the private sector’s record on infrastructure is mixed. Investors won’t invest without the promise of high rates of return. And when private investment does occur, it can send costs soaring: In Bayonne, New Jersey, water bills rose almost 28 percent after private entities took charge of the city’s public water system.
But public-private partnerships can work—if government attaches the right conditions. When Prince George’s County, Maryland, teamed up with the engineering firm Corvias to launch its Clean Water Partnership in 2015, a performance contract set out two objectives: to improve stormwater management with green infrastructure, and to hire local small and minority-owned businesses to carry out the work. The partnership has so far met or exceeded all of its economic, social, and environmental objectives—on time and under budget.
To build an infrastructure for the future, we need to spend more. But we also need to spend smarter, by taking a systems approach to infrastructure.
To build an infrastructure for the future, we need to spend more. But we also need to spend smarter, by taking a systems approach to infrastructure. As Spieler puts it,“We should use every infrastructure project as a chance to solve as many problems as possible.”
A more holistic approach can save money while turning problems into solutions. For example, the city of Lille, in France, now powers its bus fleet with treated methane gas produced by its sewage-treatment plant and its organic waste facility. The federal government can help find similar solutions, by encouraging cross-disciplinary research and interagency collaboration.
Finally, we must protect our investments in infrastructure by making sure they are properly maintained—notes Hillary Brown of the City College of New York, “Nobody wants to put money into maintenance. They’d rather have a new bridge named after them. We’ve got to have a culture shift, because we don’t have the luxury of rebuilding these things when they fail every few years.”
The sorry state of our nation’s infrastructure has drawn back the curtain, revealing systems that are unsustainable and unjust. With that insight, we can rebuild for a greener, fairer, more prosperous future.