I hear the US lags behind a lot of developed countries in infrastructure For those of you who have been to other countries, how was the infrastructure there?
Well, what do you mean by infrastructure? I’m a Singaporean that drove around SF, LV, LA and the Grand Canyon once, so take my comments with that in mind.
In terms of roads, I have to say that US roads are really kind of rough. It’s not really a fair comparison with Singapore since we’re so small, but Japanese roads are crazy good, and Australia’s roads are pretty ok. I’ve never actually seen a pothole in any of those countries, the US was the first.
Trains were about the same in SF as could be expected in a city of that size - we’re not comparing with Tokyo of course. I took little to no public transport in LA or LV, but I understand there’s not much public transport anyway, which is probably similar to the situation in AU or a small town in Japan. Rail transport is much better in Japan and Europe though, where even small towns are serviced by commuter rail.
Water and electricity were about the same everywhere.
Any other specific areas you were thinking of?
I’ve been to Europe a bunch and it’s a heck of a lot easier to get around by rail than in the States.
Highways are more or less the same everywhere. The problem with roads in the Northeast USA is the winters. They create a lot of potholes so it always seems like roads are constantly being fixed. Also, those older cities are really built up around the highways so it’s tough to expand them. When I go to Texas and some other cities, the highways seem ridiculously wide and have these massive 5-level stack interchanges.
I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Their infrastructure sucks pretty bad for a city of 20+ million people.
New York City airports are horrible.
The power grid in the US (I’ve lived in CA, MA and AL) is much less reliable than Japan. Growing up in Japan, a power outage was something I only read about in books or heard about on TV. I may have experienced it first-hand in a bad typhoon, but that was about it. I don’t think I ever saw anyone in Japan use a UPS for their computer.
The passenger rail system in the US is, of course, non-existent by Japanese and European standards. Even in cities that have good subways, the equipment is antiquated. In Japan it’s rare to see passenger trains on major routes that are more than 20 years old.
City roads are not that different. Rural roads in Japan are as good as city roads. I don’t think they have a word for “chip seal.” In fact, their problem is too much new construction - lots of corruption and pork barrel spending leading to unnecessary construction projects in rural areas. Driving through the countryside, you see lots of brand new bridges and tunnels that obviously replaced a perfectly good but more curvy nearby road.
I know that, in the US, one of the aspects of infrastructure where we have a serious issue are things like bridges and dams; we have a lot of them that are in disrepair, or in need of replacement. I have no idea how this compares to other countries, however.
Edit: a cite on the US bridge situation. Nearly 56,000 bridges are “structurally deficient”, and 41% of U.S. bridges are over 40 years old, and have never undergone major reconstruction. https://www.artba.org/2017/02/15/nearly-56000-american-bridges-on-structurally-deficient-list-new-analysis-of-federal-data-shows/
Don’t assume that means they aren’t terribly congested (I live in Texas and commute on such highways.)
I don’t think we’re too bad off. Here’s how the CIA describes the USA in various categories:
Energy:
Electricity access:
electrification - total population: 100% (2016)
Electricity - production:
4.088 trillion kWh (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 2
Electricity - consumption:
3.911 trillion kWh (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 2
Electricity - exports:
9.695 billion kWh (2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 25
Electricity - imports:
80.66 billion kWh (2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 2
Electricity - installed generating capacity:
1.074 billion kW (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 3
Electricity - from fossil fuels:
70.6% of total installed capacity (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 103
Electricity - from nuclear fuels:
9.2% of total installed capacity (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 18
Electricity - from hydroelectric plants:
7.4% of total installed capacity (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 124
Electricity - from other renewable sources:
10.7% of total installed capacity (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 69
Crude oil - production:
8.853 million bbl/day (2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 3
Crude oil - exports:
590,900 bbl/day (2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 21
Crude oil - imports:
7.85 million bbl/day (2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 1
Crude oil - proved reserves:
36.52 billion bbl (1 January 2017 es)
country comparison to the world: 11
Refined petroleum products - production:
20.08 million bbl/day (2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 1
Refined petroleum products - consumption:
19.69 million bbl/day (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 1
Refined petroleum products - exports:
4.67 million bbl/day (2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 1
Refined petroleum products - imports:
2.205 million bbl/day (2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 2
Natural gas - production:
766.2 billion cu m (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 1
Natural gas - consumption:
773.2 billion cu m (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 1
Natural gas - exports:
50.52 billion cu m (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 7
Natural gas - imports:
76.96 billion cu m (2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 4
Natural gas - proved reserves:
8.714 trillion cu m (1 January 2016 es)
country comparison to the world: 4
Carbon dioxide emissions from consumption of energy:
5.402 billion Mt (2013 est.)
country comparison to the world: 2
Communications:
Telephones - fixed lines:
total subscriptions: 121.53 million
subscriptions per 100 inhabitants: 38 (July 2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 3
Telephones - mobile cellular:
total: 416.684 million
subscriptions per 100 inhabitants: 129 (July 2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 4
Telephone system:
general assessment: a large, technologically advanced, multipurpose communications system
domestic: a large system of fiber-optic cable, microwave radio relay, coaxial cable, and domestic satellites carries every form of telephone traffic; a rapidly growing cellular system carries mobile telephone traffic throughout the country
international: country code - 1; multiple ocean cable systems provide international connectivity; satellite earth stations - 61 Intelsat (45 Atlantic Ocean and 16 Pacific Ocean), 5 Intersputnik (Atlantic Ocean region), and 4 Inmarsat (Pacific and Atlantic Ocean regions) (2016)
Broadcast media:
4 major terrestrial TV networks with affiliate stations throughout the country, plus cable and satellite networks, independent stations, and a limited public broadcasting sector that is largely supported by private grants; overall, thousands of TV stations broadcasting; multiple national radio networks with many affiliate stations; while most stations are commercial, National Public Radio (NPR) has a network of some 600 member stations; satellite radio available; overall, nearly 15,000 radio stations operating (2008)
Internet country code:
.us
Internet users:
total: 246,809,221
percent of population: 76.2% (July 2016 est.)
country comparison to the world: 4
Transportation:
National air transport system:
number of registered air carriers: 92
inventory of registered aircraft operated by air carriers: 6,817
annual passenger traffic on registered air carriers: 798.23 million
annual freight traffic on registered air carriers: 37.219 billion mt-km (2015)
Civil aircraft registration country code prefix:
N (2016)
Airports:
13,513 (2013)
country comparison to the world: 1
Airports - with paved runways:
total: 5,054
over 3,047 m: 189
2,438 to 3,047 m: 235
1,524 to 2,437 m: 1,478
914 to 1,523 m: 2,249
under 914 m: 903 (2013)
Airports - with unpaved runways:
total: 8,459
over 3,047 m: 1
2,438 to 3,047 m: 6
1,524 to 2,437 m: 140
914 to 1,523 m: 1,552
under 914 m: 6,760 (2013)
Heliports:
5,287 (2013)
Pipelines:
natural gas 1,984,321 km; petroleum products 240,711 km (2013)
Railways:
total: 293,564.2 km
standard gauge: 293,564.2 km 1.435-m gauge (2014)
country comparison to the world: 1
Roadways:
total: 6,586,610 km
paved: 4,304,715 km (includes 76,334 km of expressways)
unpaved: 2,281,895 km (2012)
country comparison to the world: 1
Waterways:
41,009 km (19,312 km used for commerce; Saint Lawrence Seaway of 3,769 km, including the Saint Lawrence River of 3,058 km, is shared with Canada) (2012)
country comparison to the world: 5
Merchant marine:
total: 3,611
by type: bulk carrier 5, container ship 61, general cargo 114, oil tanker 66, other 3,365 (2017)
country comparison to the world: 5
Ports and terminals:
cargo ports: Baton Rouge, Corpus Christi, Hampton Roads, Houston, Long Beach, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Plaquemines (LA), Tampa, Texas City
container port(s) (TEUs): Hampton Roads (2,549,000), Houston (2,131,000), Long Beach (7,192,000), Los Angeles (8,160,000), New York/New Jersey (6,372,000), Oakland (2,278,000), Savannah (3,737,000), Seattle (3,531,000) (2015)
cruise departure ports (passengers): Miami (2,032,000), Port Everglades (1,277,000), Port Canaveral (1,189,000), Seattle (430,000), Long Beach (415,000) (2009)
oil terminal(s): LOOP terminal, Haymark terminal
LNG terminal(s) (import): Cove Point (MD), Elba Island (GA), Everett (MA), Freeport (TX), Golden Pass (TX), Hackberry (LA), Lake Charles (LA), Neptune (offshore), Northeast Gateway (offshore), Pascagoula (MS), Sabine Pass (TX)
LNG terminal(s) (export): Kenai (AK)
You can see for yourself how we stack up against various other countries:
I don’t know what, in particular, the OP is looking for, but this seemed like a reasonable starting point to me.
I was working for a Spanish electrical company during a period in which they’d just bought a US subsidiary (now divested). They were freaking out at how fragile the American network was; even when you realized that a lot of the area they serviced in the US had low population densities, places with comparable densities had a lot less redirectionability. “Redirectionability” means “the ability to send service through a different path when the usual one has a breakdown”; that is, in the US there were many places where, if a cable broke, it was not possible to fix the service until that specific piece of cable was fixed.
Part of it is because even for areas with similar density on paper, the actual density is often lower in the US (people tend to live in individual housing rather than apartments, houses surrounded by a garden rather than rowhouses); part of it is that for historical reasons Europe has emphasized a concept that many of the American engineers were apparently encountering for the first time. When the Spaniards said “but leaving people without service for so long is unacceptable!”, the Americans answered “oh, a lot of them have generators.”
American roads change a lot from area to area. Go to a flat area, and a rural(ish) road which in a similar French, Swedish or Portuguese landscape would have a lane and a half, and drivers praying “please dear God do not let me encounter a tractor going the other way”, in the US look almost like our highways (no divider). Go to an actual highway in a city, and you can end up with the impression that there is a potholes budget - not to fix them, but to make sure they are artistically distributed.
Passenger rail in the US is a bitter joke. Not only is it almost nonexistent, but the prices are absurd. Some 15 years ago, Amtrak Philly-NYC was 144 USD; the same switching from one subway network to the other in Trenton, 12 USD, and the subways had a lot more stations. I’m still wondering if anybody ever took that Amtrak line.
What you quote seems to be largely numbers (coverage, quantities, etc.) It gets at part of the question, but, IMO, not all of it. We have a lot of roads, near-universal electrification, tons of rail miles, etc. But, the **quality **of them may not be on par with other countries, in part because of deferred / insufficient maintenance.
I just came back from Hong Kong. The roads seem pretty good, though buses, vans and trucks predominate because of the density. The subway (MTR) is awesome. It is cheap, easy to use with Octopus card, cars come very frequently, the signage is good, and even when the car is filled (the usual case) the air conditioning is good enough that the ride is comfortable. Even my German son-in-law was impressed.
I went to the Hong Kong history museum. Free, excellent, and the food in the cafeteria was good and relatively cheap. HK$45 (about US $8) for a good bowl of broth, noodles and dumplings, with tea. When is the last time you paid that little in a museum?
Now if they just could do something about the weather…
Also, the majority of those amounts are brute numbers (no per capita or per surface), made high just by being one of the largest countries in the world. Those single-circuit areas which had my coworkers freaking out would have been multi-circuit nodes in over 99% of the Spanish network; distant locations tend to be part of the communications network, so even those get at least two circuits, separated by enough distance that a single small event such as a landslide will not break both.
Huh. That is something so taken for granted here that I never considered that it could be otherwise somewhere else–if your power line is knocked down, you have no power until they fix the line. After a tree fell across the power lines a thousand feet or so from my house during a major ice storm in 2002, I had no electricity for 9 days. That’s the longest stretch, but there have been other instances of a day or two and probably dozens of times over the years when it has been out for a few hours.
Ok this is something I didn’t know about the US. So sometimes, the power might just go out for 9 days? Like not in a natural disaster or anything, just “some line got cut”? And this is common enough that most people have their own generators?
I mean ok. TIL.
TIL for me too. The last time power went out around here it lasted for almost 45 minutes and I came this ][ close to having to dig out my battery pack to charge the tablet.
In the last fifteen years I have had three major outages:
Hurricane - two days
Thunderstorm - two days
Blizzard - four days (that was tough)
A few occasions the power has gone out for no apparent reason for maybe an hour or so.
this is in suburban Maryland
The United States is a large country with a lot of sparsely populated rural areas, and because of the peculiarities of its geography the areas east of the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Eastern Seaboard are particularly subject to periodic ice storms and occasional blizzard snow conditions, as well as hurricanes from the Gulf Coast all the way up the Atlantic Coast, and periodic flooding in many of the low-laying agricultural regions near major river systems. So yes, if you live away from a major city it is possible to get a power outage that can last for several days until service crews can repair outlaying parts of the distribution system. Nine days is probably excessive but growing up in the American Mid-West it was not uncommon for an ice storm to knock out power for a day or two following an ice storm.
It also doesn’t help that the US power grid is managed by three main private or semi-private regional entities with local distribution grids maintained by individual utilities or contractors. Because the United States was fairly early into universal household and rural electrification and has never been devastated by war the way Europe and Japan were during WWII, it has never been rebuilt or comprehensively revitalized. Because of that, it is built to a patchwork of different standards, using often obsolescent equipment from different eras, and strung together by a variety of load-balancing systems. So it is very sensitive to damage or excessive demand, and cascading failures can and have occurred which can sometimes lead to extensive damage and repair time. Of all of the infrastructure problems the US has (many) electricity is just second to crumbling bridges and tunnels in terms of potential personal and economic damage. Rolling brownouts in high density regions due to excessive demand, typically during the summer months when air conditioning in the humid or desert regions of the country is a necessity for many.
Stranger
Nine days is on the extreme side, and would nearly always be the result of something like an ice storm or hurricane taking out large numbers of power lines. When a lot of lines go down, restoring power to individual customers can take days, particularly if you live in a rural area – the power companies will likely focus first on repairs that bring larger numbers of customers back online.
Power outages that aren’t weather-related aren’t uncommon, either – a transformer blows, a line gets knocked down by a tree-trimming crew, etc., but the frequency of those probably varies greatly, depending on your local power utility, and the nature of (and maintenance level of) the distribution equipment in your area. Generally speaking, those don’t last for very long (a few hours at the most). We probably get 2-3 such outages a year.
Anecdotal: I live in suburban Chicago, in an older suburb (most of the houses were built between 1930 and 1950). We have a lot of large, mature trees, which do have a tendency to lose branches during heavy storms (and, thus, take down power lines). As a result, I’d guess that a majority of people in my neighborhood have a backup generator. I finally bought my generator five years ago, when we had four storms over the course of the summer, each of which led to a power outage of 24 to 48 hours. (Since I bought the generator, we’ve never had an outage of longer than 2 hours.)
It’s pretty rare, and it generally does require a natural disaster - most commonly a major earthquake, tornado, or ice storm. Something that causes widespread damage such that repair crews are overwhelmed and may not restore power to certain areas for several days. Although in quakes and tornadoes, the loss of electrical service to your house is often not your biggest problem.
By “rare,” I mean the probability of your particular house being without electrical service for days on end is very low. But the US is big enough so that every year we hear of a few such incidents on the news, typically from severe ice storms that bring down many overhead power lines in a region.
Generally speaking, power outages in the US are on the order of minutes, or maybe a few hours.
The last hours-long outage I can recall that was due solely to infrastructure failure (as opposed to any kind of acute weather event or natural disaster) was the Northeast blackout of 2003.
I don’t have any stats, but I doubt that most people in the US have their own generators. The people that do are likely to be concentrated in areas where the weather presents the greatest likelihood of causing long-term outages, and most exacerbates the consequences of any given outage. Generally speaking, this is the northern and northeastern US, where ice storms are more common and freezing temperatures can quickly make your home unlivable if you don’t have the electrical power to run a furnace.
ninja’d by everyone…
One thing I always find odd when I’m travelling in the U.S. is the lack of street lights.
They exist, but once often they’re dimmer, or spaced further apart than other places I have been.
I was reminded of that watching the video of the uber self-driving crash in Tempe, where a woman walking across the street at an intersection was difficult to see.