That’s exactly my point. What I’m saying is that you can’t just compare the stuff that IS getting done to the stuff that SHOULD be getting done, and then saying we aren’t doing enough. Because there’s always more stuff that needs to get done. We’ll never run out of worthwhile construction projects.
In other words, the percentage of the work we should be doing that we are doing is always going to be zero, because we should be doing an infinite amount of work. Since that’s impossible, this measurement is useless.
Not an infinite amount of work, since not all possible projects make it on the list. But if the list of projects most people think are worth doing keeps growing, we know we haven’t done enough. Not to mention that there are various measures of infrastructure quality - if they get worse we know we haven’t done enough.
The list doesn’t get bigger because people make up stuff they want to see done, it gets bigger because stuff wears out. If we don’t fix stuff that is wearing out, I think we can all agree we’re losing ground. Then we have to deal with more traffic and load. Then we can get to “wouldn’t it be nice for the on-ramp to be longer than 100 feet” stuff.
That’s where you are wrong - politically speaking that is. Falling off the ladder probably won’t make the news, or if it does on page 16 in two inches of column. Falling off a bridge will have screaming front page headlines and national coverage.
If someone falls off a ladder the reaction will be either a tragedy the putz should have been more careful. Falling off a bridge is due to government incompetence, always fun to rail at.
It is why air crashes get more coverage than car crashes - even if an equal number of people die.
“Roughly one-third or 20,000 of these purportedly hazardous bridges are located in six rural states in America’s mid-section: Iowa, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota. The fact that these states account for only 5.9% of the nation’s population seems more than a little incongruous but that isn’t even half the puzzle. It seems that these thinly populated country provinces have a grand total of 118,000 bridges. That is, one bridge for every 160 citizens—men, women and children included.”
"the overwhelming bulk of the 600,000 so-called “bridges” in America are so little used that the are more often crossed by dogs, cows, cats and tractors than they are by passenger motorists. They are essentially no different than local playgrounds and municipal parks. They have nothing to do with interstate commerce, GDP growth or national public infrastructure.
“If they are structurally “deficient” as measured by engineering standards that is not exactly a mystery to the host village, township and county governments which choose not to upgrade them. So if Iowa is content to live with 5,000 bridges—one in five of its 25,000 bridges— that are deemed structurally deficient by DOT, why is this a national crisis? Self-evidently, the electorate and officialdom of Iowa do not consider these bridges to be a public safety hazard or something would have been done long ago.”
I don’t have a quick cite to throw into the argument at this time but the topic that everyone seems to be ignoring regarding infrastructure are the “out of sight - out of mind” items such as sewers, water mains and the treatment plants (water and wastewater) that serve them.
As an example, there are water mains in Chicago that are well over 100-years old and, in fact, a drinking water pumping station that dates back to the 1870’s. This is a major problem that is ignored by localities that provide grossly insufficient funds to maintain underground conveyances. The only thing that most places respond to is when a water main breaks or sewage starts backing up in peoples houses.
We’ll do so on a significant scale at about the time infrastructure failures become so bad and so widespread the government has the choice between fixing them and society in general collapsing. At which point we probably won’t be able to keep up and the infrastructure of the nation will fall apart in a general collapse, taking the economy down semi-permanently with it.
So? That no one wants to upgrade lightly used bridges in no way means that it is also pointless to do earthquake retrofits for bridges over the San Francisco Bay. Which aren’t used by dogs. If they collapse, the loss of life would be bad enough, but the millions lost due to traffic disruptions for years afterward would be the real problem.
Well maintained cars break. Poorly maintained cars might go for a hundred thousand miles with few problems. That’s not a reason to say that oil changes are useless.
Good timing indeed, but having spent 40+ years working in water and wastewater and seeing the neglect in maintaining the infrastructure of these systems is just amazing.
And yet, most everyone on this thread still keeps talking about roads and bridges. :smack:
