GETTING THERE
"Bridge Collapse could spur infrastructure fixes", reads the B1 page story in the Wall Street Journal today. It of 
course follows in the wake of the horrific Minneapolis bridge collapse yesterday.
As this Reuters story reports today, politicians are waking up to the need to fix our infrastructure, and jumping on the bandwagon, just like clockwork.
Here are some startling statistics from the WSJ story:
"The American Society of Civil Engineers says 25% of the nation's bridges are structurally deficient or obsolete...
In its latest report card, the civil engineering society gave the nation's infrastructure a "D." Bridges received one of the highest grades at "C." It said the nation must spend $1.6 trillion over the next five years to meet its needs."
It was precisely statistics like these, that prompted me to put together a business plan to try and fix this problem in New York City, a place acutely reliant on particularly old bridges and tunnels into the island borough of Manhattan.
The plan called for an infrastructure sale-leaseback from the city, whereby the much needed repairs of the four East River bridges, requiring hundreds of millions of dollars, would be funded by tolls over a multi-decade period.
The toll-system would employ the latest emerging technologies, in order to speed up the toll-taking process, so that vehicles wouldn't even have to stop as they whizzed across the bridges every day.
The business plan represented the bulk of the grade in my second-year graduate business school class on entrepreneurship.
I got an A+ for it back in 1982, twenty-five years ago.
The professor even went on to recommend my name, unsolicited, to some Wall Street recruiters, that then sent me off on a different career path. Ironically, it ended up making New York City home for most of my adult life.
Discussing the paper after-wards, my professor commented that he found the plan appealing because the need to find public/private resources to fix the infrastructure seemed like a compelling no-brainer, given the dire "failing infrastructure" reports at the time.
So while arranging a private sale-leaseback from the city might prove politically challenging, he found the plan to be doable.
What gave him the most pause though was the automated toll-taking technology described in the report. Much of that seemed to verge on science fiction at the time. The "best-case" private equity returns calculated in the plan were particularly dependent on these toll-taking systems to be in place and working as expected.
A quarter-century later, systems that built on those technologies, like E-Z Pass in the northeast (first deployed in 1993), and others like it around the country, have since become a prosaic fact of life in our daily commutes across roads and bridges.
The irony of course is that two and a half decades later, concrete plans to address our national infrastructure problems still seem far from reality.
P.S. Also recommend Marc Andreessen's pithy post, titled "Department of Good Ideas":
"New York Times home page:
The governor of Minnesota and officials from several other states have ordered all bridges to be inspected."
Let's not forget to set the tickler reminder until the next unfortunate infrastructure event.
Infrastructure repair in the US is a disgrace. As you point out, it isn't like we don't know what needs to be done, but it is certainly annoying to read statistics as if they have just been discovered.
The problem of course is the increasing scale. The more you build, the more you have to repair. I well recall when playing Sim City that as you extended your city, the repair costs for infrastructure really started to limited the growth of your city. Unlike your privatization proposal, the only financing as the tax base.
It makes one wonder if there is a natural scale limiting factor for infrastructure that needs to be repaired on a regular cycle.
Posted by: Alex Tolley | Friday, August 03, 2007 at 05:52 PM