that infrastructure thing
China v US priorities
An early tweet I saw this morning as the east coast began awakening to the horrifying video about the Francis Scott Key bridge disaster in Baltimore. Occurring at the 18th largest American port in volume of imports and exports, especially for coal exports, liquified natural gas, and other commercial goods, the suppply chain nightmares of the Pandemic seem likely to recur for a range of goods across the United States and the globe. The tweet ended with the ominous observation that ‘infrastructure will become important again’.
No kidding. Was it ever not important?
While too many Americans forget the Eisenhower project to build a national interstate highway system, named after the late president, was originally not merely a nice set of by-ways to get from Delaware to Oregon or North Dakota to the Missisippi coast. The purpose for the interstate system was also to facilitate rapid cross country movement in case of a national security emergency. Begun in 1956, the system was complete in 1992, crossing all of the states of the Union, including the peculiarity of neither Alaska nor Hawai’i linking their interstate network to anyone else’s. The project ultimately included slightly fewer than 49,000 miles at an overall cost of $590 billion in 2024 dollars. It was, thus a big deal.
But building infrastructure is always only the first step. Infrastructure is also a host of capacities, not merely bridges.
The ports of the United States are also important infrastructure, built over successive administrations in the twentieth century along with the new-fangled aeroports for aviation. While many U.S. cities have decent deep harbours, the 300 port facilities open to cargo ships require specific standards to assure the companies operating ships of a predictable, relatively easy transit in and out of the facilities. Commercial shipping contributes a hair more than a quarter of the U.S. annual GDP.
Houston is the largest in the country with nearly 276 million tons of products entering and exiting annually. Three quarters of the largest ports in the nation are along the Gulf Coast while New York, Long Beach, Los Angeles and Norfolk round out the top 16.
Ports in some of our older cities simply don’t have the modern facilities to attract the volume of shipping that would justify their expansions considering competition elsewhere. At the same time, one has to wonder if our older ports aren’t suffering from the seemingly congenital American aversion to spending on infrastructure modernisation whether it’s reinforcing Eisenhower’s failing road system or ports or airports.
We are gradually seeing a few modern airports such as the 2023 opening of a new terminal in Kansas City. The original Kansas City downtown airport became only for private aviation when the 1972 seemingly prescient three terminal KCI opened several miles north of downtown on the Missouri side. That pathetic decentralised structure made flying painful for anyone as security measures evolved in the years after it opened. Parking might have been easy across the walkway but security gates were a pain because each gate was decentralised within one of three unlinked terminals, making transferring between airlines was virtually impossible. No walkways connected the three terminals, depressing airline offerings to a small number of flights per airline daily. The new airport has a central TSA facility, multiple commercial options, and is a more modestly-sized facility with the potential for growth if necessary but it took fifty years to get to that point.
The international airport in Honolulu is in shocking physical decline, particularly embarrassing when one disembarks from a Tokyo flight where even the old Haneda airport is glitzy. The port of entry at Dulles outside Washington or Baltimore Washington a few miles from the collapsed bridge are similarly embarrassing with threadbare conditions. Some U.S. terminals are gradually modernising but they tend to be refurbishing the existing sites rather than building anew. While that is not necessarily indicative of structural problems, the struggles to renovate raise questions of whether we are updating our air traffic control systems to meet the dramatic increase in volume of commercial and cargo flights.
We have a peculiar je ne sa qua about infrastructure as we don’t seem to grasp that is it not a one-and-done phenomenon. It takes massive capital to renew infrastructure repeatedly yet in the past forty years—definitely since George H.W. Bush’s schlacking by anti-tax groups at the polls for raising taxes—we seem to live in a fairy tale world that things will repair themselves if we ignore the costs and paying for things. Of course no one wants to pay taxes but we also adore travelling, more than we ever have. Plus, the ports, for example, support 30 million jobs in this country which encourages tenants and owners to spend $163 billion between 2021 and 2025 for increasing capacity. That is wonderful except who will pay for the unmet $12 billion expenditures over the next decade for most fundamental maintenance such as dredging those ports? Without that dredging, ports become far less useful, less efficient, less economical, les competitive, and more dangerous. I suppose we assume, if we even think about it, that someone shows up with a boat of pixie dust which morphs into money to pay for the needed maintenance but I have yet to hear about such luck.
We began hearing about bridge maintenance problems in the 1980s as the Eisenhower system reached thirty years’ use on average. The 2007 massive bridge collapse in Minneapolis-St. Paul actually resulted from reconstruction efforts that went awry on the weakened span. The Minneapolis tragedy occurred in a country with 617,000 bridges, 42% of which have been in use for more than half a century. Fully 7.5% of American bridges are ‘structurally poor’.
The ‘Build Back Better’ Act allocated 2.2 trillion in 2021 for the purpose of modernising and attacking infrastructure shortfalls. The bill ultimately included a number of provisions which seem to have little connection to the nation’s physical infrastructure by favouring climate, internet, and other steps. Yet travelling in any major city in the United States today one sees the impact of infrastructure rebuilding efforts; the question is whether those steps will be adequate or for how long considering the ever-increasing stress on infrastructure.
The Baltimore disaster additionally shows the danger in not expanding our road grid in an era of exponentially greater use of roads, ports, airports, and our overall electrical grid. It’s seductive to assume federal government budgets, in conjunction with state and local officials, can somehow address the overall needs given a commitment to the voters. But one of the greatest challenges today for U.S. infrastructure development is our penchant for litigation over projects, thus delaying them substantially, if not killing them altogether. Overall public appeal for mass transit, for example, proves the case sadly.
The Washington, DC Metro began operating in 1976, now has 98 stations. Several lines of system completely closed down for entire summers to do emergency repairs a decade ago, and the Maryland portion of the Red Line will be entirely closed in the summer of 2024. An expansion to Dulles Airport, twenty-four miles west of the District of Columbia, is a particularly illustrative case. The ‘Silver Line’ expansion, announced in 2004 at an expected cost of $5.25 billion with a 2018 opening, finally did open in November 2022 at a cost well over $6.8 billion. Disagreements over trains running above ground versus through tunnels, disagreements over stations, fare machine problems and transitions, and various other issues delayed the project repeatedly. The multiplicity of jurisdictions did not help but that is a common American issue.
The Bangkok Sky Train (BTS) has 86 stations and was constructured in fewer than seven years, even with complete shifts in the vendors involved. I could not find public cost data but recently travelled on this impressive system.
Americans prefer their cars to trains which are so common throughout much of the rest of the world yet train track remnants are common as we drive across this country. The semi-governmental AMTRAK railway system is a commonly used mode of transit along the eastern seaboard and on certain scenic routes transcontinentally. But U.S. train service is glitchy, unreliable, and eons behind that of Japan, France, or the United Kingdom. Roadbeds are in terrible condition, unable to allow genuinely high-speed service. Periodically politicians suggest massive projects to connect major cities (Baltimore and Washington—where commuter service already exists more or less) or Chicago and Nashville but the projects are always so expensive that the private companies throw in the towel before a single mile of track ever appeals.
Many would argue that privatising our infrastructure is the way to go but I have doubts. Many cities across the country grant concessions to private operators to build and maintain segements of the infrastructure but are they really making money? ‘Hot lanes’ sprang up around the nation’s capital beginning about fifteen years ago but my limited experience today is the dynamic pricing system is not as alluring as one might expect when daily costs raise to $28 each way at rush hour to transit about a dozen miles. In the grand scheme of things, as various studies often note, the time wasted in traffic is such a hit on the nation’s GDP figures but we still see transportation infrastructure as a public good in many ways. That could change with environmental concerns but it hasn’t seen the initial Earth Day some 54 years ago next month. We are a cheap bunch if at all possible.
In sum, the infrastructure problems of this country are well known and only seem to grow as our expanding population demands more services. That tweet I cited at the beginning also reminded me of an ignored aspect of the PRC’s actions over the past thirty years. We know China’s ’Four Modernisations’ for upgrading science and technology, education, agriculture, and the People’s Liberation Army. The PRC leadership understood in the 1970s that every single thing about the country was woefully behind standards elsewhere in developed states, if not additionally some lesser economies. What most people forget is that PRC leaders also chose to build infrastructure at a startling rate to provide access to and from the vast country to the east coast. China’s road system, the last time I was there in 2019, was as fine as any I have ever seen anywhere—done in remarkable speed as well.
China builds whatever structure it desires rapidly, meaning some products do not endure for long periods as corruption and poor quality turn up regularly. A 2018 road bed collapse on the line between the nation’s capital and the southern city of Guangzhou illustrated the dangers of building too quickly. The PRC leadership is also prone to embrace ‘high viz’ projects such as the 18 mile ‘Maglev’ magnetic train from Pudong to the Shanghai International Airport, travelling at certain spots at 431 kilometers per hour (267.8 mph), took fewer than three years to construct at basically a billion dollars U.S. per mile.
China, of course, claims to accomplish these modernisation efforts through private corporations but the firms were clearly part of the PRC state eco-system which brought about the dramatic change to allow access to the world from most interior portions of the country. PRC leaders brook no contrary views to their actions, regardless of questions such as those still circulating about the dangers of the massive Three Gorges Dam across the upper Yangtze. No law suits, no public hearings, and no conversations between Beijing and local Party officials. The Party decides for the nation—period.
We have our advantages in our system but updating our infrastructure is a painful experience for Americans. President Biden announced the federal government will rebuilt the Key Bridge for Baltimore but I cannot imagine how long this will require. We have an attitude which hurts both our competitiveness and personal experiences but the shift to embrace greater, more appropriate modern infrastructure will require generations. We are not likely to have that long to raise our competitiveness with others around the globe, not exclusively China.
I appreciate any thoughts on infrastructure. I also recommend we have a national debate on this vital issue but doubt we will. Please feel free to circulate this column if you find it of value. Thank you for reading and for those who support it financially as you are so vital to my work as you inspire me each and every single day.
Another brilliant sunrise in the Chesapeake.
Be well and be safe. FIN
American Society of Civil Engineers, 2021 Report Card on America’s Infrastructure: Ports, retrieved at https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/ports-infrastructure/
American Society of Civil Engineers, Making the Grade. 2021, retrieved at https://infrastructurereportcard.org/making-the-grade/
‘The I35W Bridge Collapse: What Happened, What Changed’, cbsnews.com, 30 July 2007, retrieved at https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/bridge-collapse-whats-changed/