205 Comments

This is a good post, but I'm not sure bridge failures are the best measure of bridge quality. I'm a bridge engineer and some of the talk I've seen in the industry is more about aging bridges and maintenance costs, basically that inadequate funding for preventative maintenance ends up costing more in the long run. If your maintenance budget is too small then bridges that could have been maintained inexpensively turn into bridges that need expensive repairs ten years from now. The poster child used to be the Greenfield Bridge in Pittsburgh that was crumbling so badly they constructed nets and a smaller bridge underneath just to catch debris. That seems like a good chunk of money that could have been put to better use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_Bridge

Just want to add a disclaimer that though I'm a bridge engineer I know very little about the national condition of bridges so I'm not trying to speak from authority there, just mentioning what I've seen in seminars and such.

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I think the NYC-centrism of the American publishing industry feeds into this a lot, because as you note the BQE really is crumbling, and the general road quality in NYC really is terrible.

But NYC’s roadway maintenance problems are largely administrative and occasionally simply criminal. The various city agencies involved don’t coordinate maintenance timelines so replaced roads sit for weeks without lane markers, milled out roads take weeks to get new asphalt poured, recently resurfaced roads get dug into for utility maintenance, and certain favored neighborhoods get their roads resurfaced regularly while the Bronx rots. And of course sometimes scheduled work just mysteriously doesn’t happen. (Bike path maintenance happens halfway to never, of course.) None of this can be solved by increasing he NY DoT’s resurfacing budget, although increasing the federal DoJ’s appetite for municipal corruption cases frankly might help.

Also I’m not so sanguine that the BQE is going to be rebuilt any time soon. The much more likely scenario to me would be a replay of the fate of the original West Side Highway: a section of it is going to collapse (everybody is worried about the cantilever along the Brooklyn promenade but don’t discount the possibility of one of the concrete supports under the southern stretch through Sunset Park giving way and killing a lot of people in the process) and it’ll sit closed and condemned for a decade or more as lawsuits fly back and forth.

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I recently realized a lot of my personal frustration with America’s highways just stems from I-95 itself. It is maddening that the major artery between the country’s capital and its largest city narrows to two lanes at multiple points. I sit in traffic and think about how China Will Win every time.

But I understand that most people don’t need to regularly make the NYC metro suburb to NYC metro suburb trips that I make, and public transit is just not well designed for my suburb to suburb commute. For most, 95 is an occasional hassle rather than a regular source of frustration.

Still, tractor trailers are just *sitting* in the Bronx for hours every day. Between the local pollution effects and the global CO2 consequences, something needs to be done. And I need to friggin move.

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"My daily commute is down to my basement where Slow Boring Headquarters is located."

A vertical commute. Do you use an elevator, helicopter, or an Elon Musk rocket-powered hyperpod?

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Hey Matt, you probably already know this, but the NYT Morning Newsletter today quoted your Substack from yesterday pretty substantially.

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How did years of living in DC get you to mellow out on sprawl? For me, dating somebody with parents were way out in the MD burbs and seeing those big houses that were relatively new but already beginning to fall apart; listening to a boss complain about their 90 minute commute and then complain about people riding their bikes to work; hearing friends who moved to the burbs talk about how much they hated coming into the city to do stuff; hearing those same friends brag that their rent is $200 less than it was in the city, but also complain about the cost of car insurance; etc etc...has only made my rage grow. Maybe it shifted from a cultural rage to the same kind of rage that makes me mute "dog" on Twitter--a more precise, needling rage.

Aside from the rage point, when you're on your way up to Maine you should try to drive though Albany if you ever want to see a beautiful city truly destroyed by Robert Moses-think.

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Honest question: how is the "induced demand" argument suggesting that building more roads will make traffic worse functionally different than the NIMBY argument that building more market rate housing will make housing issues worse?

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Three comments.

1) While not NECESSARILY a problem, I’m suspicious of a bill that seems to imply that part of the benefits is to create jobs. Jobs are a COST in a cost benefit calculation. And if the spending pattern increases demand for high-skilled jobs more than low-skilled jobs, that is rather anti-redistributive.

2) We ought not be too concerned about the amounts per category. If there is a good selection procedure, we will not invest “too much” on any category. And if the procedure is bad, even less money will not be well spent.

3) I am concerned that investment in outmoded federal infrastructure (e.g. IRS computer and auditing systems) and maintenance does not get a category.

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Good post. Let me again emphasize the importance of port improvements. The US is an import dependent country. Most of those imports arrived by sea in shipping containers. The global logistics system is under tremendous stress right now. The Suez Canal blockage was another Brock in the Wall. Another stress point is LA/Long Beach where dozens of ships are idling offshore. Increasing the throughput of American ports is imperative.

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I confess I don't get this post:

America's commute times are short (because it relies more on cars than all the other countries?) but what that says about the conditions of the roads, I have no idea.

People don't like paying higher taxes and that means they're fine with the roads (or maybe they want to get things for free, or want to eliminate the "waste, fraud and abuse"?)

The average roughness of roads has decreased, but left out is that (mostly state and local) spending on operations and maintenance has increased (but maybe the federal government should cover more of that with zero real interest loans and let states and localities divert money to other crucial things?)

The ASCE raised our grade from D- to D so everything is fine now. Not that I believe them when they say we're in terrible shape so why should I believe them when they say things are better?

The money from increased taxes going to highways etc would be better used for, e.g., child poverty (probably true) -- but it's 5% of the total bill, so perhaps isn't the best target for reallocation.

Well, I guess every post can't be a winner.

Also, this:

>>but the biggest issue is that even as Los Angeles built out their transit infrastructure, they didn’t change land use policy to encourage dense development near the stations.<<

Well, there's some truth here, although LA is taking steps to increase density around transit stations (such as the TOC program). Much more can and should be done. But that's not the biggest issue. Far bigger is that LA is simply really really big geographically. The city itself is 503 square miles, compared to 234 for Chicago. The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan statistical area is 4850 square miles. You'd have to build a *lot* of track to cover extensive areas like these. Unfortunately, most of LA Metro doesn't connect people where they live, and where they work, and other places they want to go. That's one of the reasons why ridership is so low.

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I'm worried that we're once again focused on the "last war" and not true upcoming realities. The budget for repairing and upgrading our electrical infrastructure is a step in the right direction, but with impending self-driving car technology coming (never as soon as Elon says, but still...), shouldn't we be planning for THAT? The cost of Uber/Lyft/TeslaRide will then be competitive with public transport costs (since no need to pay a driver), and why would I spend two hours on public transit when I can spend half that in a self-driven car for my commute for around the same money? Roads will become more important again, public transport less so.

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The first step to ignoring a problem is pretending it doesn't exist. You have done a fine job here with some of the goofiest charts I have ever seen. Oddly this does not mean I disagree with the funding levels advocated in the Biden plan for fixing 'crumbling' infrastructure in the way of roads and bridges. It just means you don't have a clue what you are talking about when it comes to what crumbling might mean. What, pray tell, is a bridge failure? It falls down? Or it is deemed unsafe to use? If the former the only acceptable standard is zero. The basis of that particular chart is ludicrous. Failures per million kilometers of road is a stupid way to measure anything. The US has a lot more roads, particularly highways, and a lot more bridges or overpasses per kilometers of road than designs used in other jurisdictions. Which means you have more in absolute terms than anyone else. Seriously, who thinks the Russians are stunningly good at building and maintaining this sort of infrastructure?

The fact that the highway and road system is well designed and suits most people's needs is a good thing. They are. But they must be maintained. I do not think you understand the significance of the road roughness chart either. The fact that it is trending downward is a good thing. But that is entirely due to the recognition that rough roads carry immense costs in transportation efficiency, vehicle maintenance but most importantly lives. Rough roads cost lives. I note that this piece seems to conflate simply fixing decaying infrastructure and other improvements to such infrastructure. Don't do that. No one is talking about adding lanes to your crumbling New York highway or any other such thing. We are talking fixing what exists. Which is perfectly possible, necessary unless you want it falling on your head, but expensive. The longer you delay it the more expensive it gets.

I am glad you are taking the whole induced demand argument with a grain of salt. You should, it is a dumb argument. If you build more road capacity you get more traffic? No kidding. Exactly the same thing happens to every transportation system. I don't know who thinks that if you increase density and max out your subway capacity in place like New York you won't need to figuratively build more lanes. And man is that expensive and time consuming. So I have sad news.

To those people who admire the big comfy seats on Amtrak trains I have similar bad news. If it carried the traffic to make it economically viable those big comfy seats would go away fast.

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I've never understood the argument for VMT tax, at least so long as fossil-fuel cars remain the norm. A gas tax effectively taxes the miles you drive divided by the fuel efficiency of your vehicle, which seems optimal, encouraging people to drive less and / or use a more fuel efficient vehicle.

I understand the issue in the US is that the current gas tax comes up a little short in terms of highway funding. In many countries the situation is the opposite, and what motorists pay into the system in terms of Vehicle Tax + Fuel Duty + VAT (usually paid *on top* of fuel duty on fuel, plus on other car related items) + Tolls + Congestion Charges often greatly exceeds what is actually spent on the road network.

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Matt--you say the US is a laggard in employment to population ratio, but the study you link to doesn't say this. The study just shows that other countries are catching up to the US--it shows rates of change, and some cross-sectional levels, but not overall levels.

As of 2013, the US has the 18th highest employment to population ratio in the world per wikipedia. It's slightly below the G7 average, but is above the median (the average has a positive skew from very high rates in a couple countries).

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I've noticed that roads are a good bit smoother in Germany. I don't know how much more that costs, but it is nice.

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Another view, from Washington State.

State's bridges, roads crumbling faster than they can be fixed

The Ship Canal Bridge on I-5 carries a quarter-million people every day between North Seattle and downtown. It's wearing out, and ignoring its severe deterioration will have “dire consequences,” a state report warns. In fact, it adds, Washington would need to spend an estimated $14.8 billion over the coming decade to achieve “minimally acceptable condition” for roads, ferries and bridges. Will this be the year lawmakers stop procrastinating? Here’s what they have in the works. (Photo: Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times)

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