America’s Infrastructure Badly Needs Work — and Remember, It’s More Than Just Roads

By Elizabeth Brotherton-Bunch
Jul 10 2019 |
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Pipelines, airports, subways, you name it. All of it needs serious help.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of infrastructure?

Probably roads, right? Maybe bridges? Roads and bridges are often the photo that accompany news stories on infrastructure, after all.

But infrastructure — no joke — is more than just what we build to drive around on.

Infrastructure powers our communities. Infrastructure disposes of our trash and handles our hazardous waste. Infrastructure is what delivers safe drinking water to our homes — and we know what happens when those systems fail.

But just like our crumbling roads and bridges, the rest of our infrastructure is in desperate need of investment, too.

Take this recent story in The Wall Street Journal. America is in the midst of a natural gas boom, with production at a record high. But the infrastructure needed to move it around the country just plain does not exist:

“Pipelines aren’t in the right places, and when they are, they’re usually decades old and often too small,” the WSJ reports. “The result, despite natural-gas prices that look low on commodities exchanges, is energy feast and famine.”

Here’s the result: Two utilities that service New York City recently stopped accepting new natural gas customers because of jammed supply lines into the city. But in West Texas, “drillers have so much excess natural gas they are simply burning it off, roughly enough each day to fuel every home in the state.”

That last line bears repeating: There’s a wealth of natural gas in Texas, but because producers can’t deliver it, they’re burning enough off every day — every single day! — to power every home in the Lone Star State.

Meanwhile, public transit in America is far behind the rest of the world — CityLab described it as being “on life support.” Even in the places that have embraced it, like Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., have seen highly publicized quality declines in recent years. Don’t even get us started on what’s happened to passenger rail.

For those traveling by plane, things aren’t better. Air travel might have gotten its start in the good ole U.S. of A., but America’s airports are now among the worst in the world. As the Daily Beast noted in 2018, this isn’t by accident: Other countries invested in their air transportation, while U.S. leaders “allowed our travel infrastructure to fall way behind international standards.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

There’s nearly universal agreement that America needs to seriously invest in its infrastructure. I mean, the AFL-CIO and Chamber of Commerce come together to jointly lead #InfrastructureWeek every year — you think those organizations find common ground very often? Even President Trump and House Democrats were trying to outdo each other in terms of how much they would spend on infrastructure investment!

But what is lacking is the actual political willpower to get the job done. When it came time for Trump and the Democrats to agree upon a number and get to work, politics happened

Meanwhile, the airports are still terrible, the subways are still delayed, they’re still burning excess natural gas in Texas, and Flint still doesn’t have clean water.

The joke’s over. It’s time to get the job done.