Simply throwing money at large scale civil engineering projects is a very inefficient way to fix major problems.
Episode Summary:
As we finally emerge from the Covid pandemic, kickstarting Western economies means infrastructure: large public works projects. Delivering projects such as bridges, highways and utilities on time and on budget has always been a challenge, but when the imperative is to throw money at the problem immediately, it becomes essentially impossible. Much American infrastructure is built by the lowest bidder, a process that rarely delivers long-term durability. Would American ratepayers and motorists be prepared to pay a little more for infrastructure that lasts a century or more? We don’t know, but maybe it’s time to find out.
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Transcript of this week’s show:
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Post-Covid, governments around the world are looking at major infrastructure spending projects to kickstart flagging economies. There’s a long history of this, from roadbuilding in the Roman Empire to Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, but today there is increasing emphasis on value for money. Public works projects are notoriously inefficient, sometimes through graft and outright corruption, but more frequently through incompetence and high levels of time and money wasting bureaucracy. Opponents of major public works projects can in fact the use the bureaucracy to stop a project in its tracks. Want to halt a new offramp? Demand an environmental assessment to make sure the frogs are protected.
Now, I’m bringing up roadbuilding for a reason. In most of the Western world, and all over America, the universal metric for good infrastructure is the absence of the ubiquitous pothole. There’s a surprising amount of technology in rolling asphalt on to an engineered concrete or aggregate base, but at the level of understanding of the non-engineer, which is most of us, it’s a simple equation: we want smooth, high quality roads, we want them without paying taxes. We all want something for nothing, but in our society, maintenance of things like concrete and steel expressways and bridge structures have become so expensive that local politicians frequently defer until the structures become a safety threat. Why?
The engineering answer has to do with materials, construction techniques, quality control and research, but the real reason is money. There are places in Europe where roads built in Roman times are still in daily use. There are German Autobahns that use bridges built in the 1930s. In America, I’ve seen steel reinforced concrete columns supporting elevated expressways that spall so badly that I’m scared to drive under them, 20 years after construction. So here’s the conundrum. To deliver value for money, politicians frequently use open bidding processes and reward the projects to the lowest bidder. The projected life of major infrastructure assets is on the order of decades, and politicians argue that ratepayers simply won’t pay today for durability that will deliver a payoff long after they are dead. But is that true?
When you look at perpetual road maintenance on major American expressways, year after year, are we certain that taxpayers, especially motorists, won’t pay a little more for technologies that will last 50 or 60 years instead of 15 or 20? We don’t know, but we generally craft civil engineering standards and codes with safety as the logical priority, and leave durability as something to be negotiated between buyer and seller. If we altered national standards to require that critical infrastructure like bridges and freeways last 50 or 60 years without major repair, would the public accept the cost? We don’t really know, but the more important question is, what would it cost?
I’d like to see a mandatory public works bidding process that requires bidders to submit two or three separate bids for the same project, with a short, medium, and long term life expectancy. Maybe 20 years, 50 years, and 100 years. And a public process to really find out if motorists would pay an extra dime on a road toll, or nickel on a gallon of gas, or 50 bucks on a property assessment, for roads that don’t need a Humvee to drive on, or that bottle up 50,000 commuters every morning due to construction. What’s your time worth? At 8:30 on a Tuesday morning, mine’s worth an extra nickel.
