Too Big to Fall: America's Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward

2. Following the Money: Road and Bridge Funding and the Maintenance Deficit

2 Following the Money Road and Bridge Funding and the Maintenance Deficit In the wake of the collapse of the i-­ 35w Bridge in Minneapolis, attention quickly focused on the straitened financial condition of the MinnesotaDepartmentof Transportation(mn/dot).Withinmonths, reports began to circulate about how political and financial considerations may have affected decisions made in the months leading up to the disaster. mn/dot officials issued predictable, and doubtless sincere, denials that they would never have compromised the safety of a bridge out of financial considerations. “No, we would never do that because of money,” said a mn/dot engineer, for example, when asked if financial constraints had played a role in the decision not to reinforce steel members deemed particularly susceptible to cracking.1 Yet there should be no doubt that inadequate funding was a key factor in mn/dot’s decisions not only to call off the planned retrofitting of the bridge but also to forgo nondestructive testing that would have revealed the full extent of fatigue cracking on the bridge. And it was inadequateresourcesforremediationthatledtothedecisiontoputoff until 2022 the deck replacement that would have added redundancy to the bridge. Moreover, it was not until after the i-­ 35w Bridge fell into the Mississippi and killed thirteen people that Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty gave up his previously unshakable opposition to raising the state’s gasoline tax, thus providing needed revenues for the financially starved mn/dot. “This isn’t a bridge that failed. This is government that failed,” concluded a Minnesota state legislator.2 The same could be said of New York City when, owing to short-­ sighted budget cuts, nycdot stopped lubricating its bridges, with the eventual result that the Williamsburg Bridge became separated from its abutment at one end—a defect that could easily have led to disaster. 42 Too Big to Fall The same can be said, in fact, of the United States as a whole, which—according to the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers (asce)—faces a five-­ year investment shortfall for its roads and bridges of $549.5 billion.3 How did the nation get into this mess? It did not happen overnight and, viewed in historical perspective, represents the failure not just of government but of the entire American polity to come to terms with the true cost of a highway infrastructure that was once the best in the world but that now stands in need of extensive, and expensive, remediation. The Creation of the American Highway System and the Origins of the Maintenance Deficit Our nation has a long history of neglecting the maintenance of its roads and bridges. In colonial times, the upkeep of a post road was the responsibility of the local government, and local residents were required to provide the labor for the maintenance. After the revolution , traffic on what was still a small network of roads began to increase , and existing maintenance efforts proved ineffective. To deal with heightened demand, state governments chartered private turnpike companies that were given the right to build roads and charge tolls for their use; in the absence of government standards, the quality of the turnpikes varied considerably from place to place. These early examples of public-­ private partnerships acknowledged the inability of local governments to build roads as efficiently as private enterprise could. After 1800, many states used tolls to pay for the upkeep of major roads while continuing to use state labor to maintain local ones. As the country expanded in the first half of the nineteenth century, much debate centered on the need for federal funding for road construction and improvement. Congress, immersed in its efforts to address serious postrevolutionary deficits, provided only very limited amounts of support. In 1822, President James Monroe vetoed a bill authorizing federal imposition of tolls to raise money on national roads for main- Following the Money 43 tenance as not authorized by the Constitution.4 This set a precedent for states to assume the responsibility for maintaining roads, which would survive until well into the twentieth century. After the Civil War, with road construction as well as maintenance firmlyestablishedasastateandlocalresponsibility,localwagonroads remained an important part of the transportation infrastructure even as railroads became the favored means of long-­ distance transportation . Property taxes, poll taxes, and state labor supported most road construction and maintenance in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a...