China's Pan-Pearl River Delta: Regional Cooperation and Development

3. Rebuilding and Renewing America: A Twenty-First Century National Infrastructure Investment Plan for the United States

3 Rebuilding and Renewing America: A Twenty-First Century National Infrastructure Investment Plan for the United States Robert D. Yaro America faces a host of challenges in the coming century, all of which will have profound impacts on the nation’s future growth and development. Global economic restructuring, rising fuel and household costs, climate change and deteriorating infrastructure all require strategies to maximize the nation’s continued prosperity, opportunity and quality of life. In the face of these challenges, though, America is flying blind. No national strategy exists to build and manage the infrastructure systems needed to sustain inclusive economic growth and our competitive position in the global economy, and to secure a healthy environment for our children and grandchildren. Our global competitors are now racing ahead to build infrastructure to ensure their full participation in the twenty-first century economy. While America spends about 2.4 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on infrastructure, China and India spend 9 per cent and 4.6 per cent of theirs, respectively (Congressional Budget Office 2007; Reuters India 2007; Singer 2007). Every American lives with the consequences of decades of underinvestment, including congested and deteriorating highways, unsafe bridges, inadequate transit and inter-city rail systems, delayed flights and bottlenecked seaports. Delayed shipments and the costs of congestion place every business in the country at a disadvantage compared with overseas competitors. This was not always the case. The growth of this nation is due in part to farsighted investments that built canals, railways, power generation projects, bridges and roads, and protected the nation’s environmental heritage, including its forests, wetlands, coastlines, parks, drinking water and clean air. America has a history of national plans that shape development: the Gallatin Plan in 1808; Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation plans in 1908; and the work of the New Deal-era National Resources Planning Board, which led to the launch of the Interstate Highway System in 1956. It’s time to do it again. 44 Robert D. Yaro The Regional PlanAssociation’sAmerica 2050 project is dedicated to advancing a new vision for the future ofAmerica’s infrastructure. Just as the Interstate Highway System provided a road map for the country’s growth fifty years ago, we now need a similarly ambitious vision, but one that responds to the challenge of increased foreign competition while cutting greenhouse gases and reducing our over-reliance on imported oil. The United States continues to have great potential to compete and lead in the twenty-first century economy because of its vast human, natural and technological resources, but to do so effectively and efficiently, it must respond to four central challenges. The Challenges We Face Global competitiveness There has been an outpouring of studies in the past several years documenting the challenges facing the United States as an economic, cultural, moral and political world leader in the twenty-first century. For all of their differences, three critical themes emerge. First, the United States, as a mature industrial society and leader of the post-World War II (WWII) free world, is losing its competitive edge in the global economy. Second, the vast infrastructure systems created throughout the twentieth century are at the end of their useful life, require major reconstruction or are overcrowded and congested, undercutting America’s ability to compete both in its traditional fields of dominance and in emerging arenas of importance. Third, the recognition of problems is not the challenge; rather, it is the lack of imagination, creativity and, most of all, political will and leadership to re-think the fundamental principles and institutional design of our policy-making and governing processes. To do so will require harnessing the resources and capacities of both the public and private sectors to fashion twenty-first century strategies for sustained and sustainable growth. Infrastructure Over the past two centuries, we have built transportation, water supply and protection, and energy production and transmission systems that have supported our growth and been the envy of the world. However, we have not created the new capacity needed to underpin the next generation of economic development, let alone maintain what we have built. An astonishing series of bridge collapses and levee failures have underscored America’s dangerous infrastructure deficit, estimated by theAmerican Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) at US$1.6 trillion (ASCE 2005). In 45 Rebuilding and Renewing America the nation’s transportation system alone, the recent National Surface Transportation Commission estimated...