Hey, my father was former local ASCE president, and his coworker wrote the ASCE infrastructure report for the county, and we didn’t get jack shit for juking the stats! Those contractors were so greedy they forgot to give us our cut!
Where to begin…
Everybody is in favor of infrastructure spending to some degree. Why just a few weeks ago, in my hometown, they demolished a bridge to make room for a more modern and safe structure. Good news! And nobody in the area is complaining about a new bridge, except perhaps some people who wanted to spend money to preserve the old one.
If all choices were this easy, there wouldn’t be any debates. But for every bridge across the Monongahela River, where the next bridge isn’t for miles, there is a bridge to nowhere. Or a John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport. Or even high-speed rail, where the benefits cannot begin to justify investments unlike regional transit, freight rail, or many other infrastructure choices that could be made with the money.
Now, I am all for building what needs to be built. I live in the DC area these days and supported projects like Metro expansion, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, and the Mixing Bowl project - all of which were massive infrastructure projects indeed. That doesn’t mean I’ll do this blindly and uncritically - when Metro wanted to put the station underground at Dulles I criticized this as a wasteful and unnecessary use of tons of money - because that was what it was.
Now the station is being put aboveground, where it should have been planned to go in the first place. Now - isn’t that how this sort of thing is supposed to work?
This is more about maintaining and replacing existing infrastructure, not as much starting brand new projects.
Sorry. The two notions can’t be separated easily. At some point it becomes cheaper to tear down the old bridge and build a new one.
Fine with me - so long as there is a need for the bridge there in the first place.