Pretending it is 1952

Charles Marohn, New Urban Network
The American Society of Civil Engineers has just released a report that should be titled, "Pretending it is 1952." Like a broken record, ASCE is again painting a bleak picture of the future if American politicians — as if they need to be plied — won’t open up the checkbook for our noble engineers. And in a way that the Soviet Central Committee would have expected from Pravda, the media and blogger world is sounding the alarm. This feels more like a cult than a serious discussion on America’s future.
In the Long Depression of the 1870s, the railroads found they had over-invested in transportation capacity. Speculating on future growth and the returns on land development, they collectively built more rail lines than could be put to productive use. The result was a huge financial correction in which the private-sector railroads consolidated their routes, down-sized their unproductive infrastructure and put their reserve capacity into endeavors that had a higher rate of return. This was a painful, but necessary, correction.
The parallels to 2011 are obvious. We’ve built out the interstate highway system as it was originally envisioned — although we opted to go through cities instead of around as planned — and then we built some more. We poured money in highways, county roads and local streets. We have so much transportation infrastructure — a huge proportion of it with no productivity — that every level of government is now choking on maintenance costs.
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