Bridge 'blame' The Failure Is All Ours

[thedrifter]

BRIDGE 'BLAME' THE FAILURE IS ALL OURS

By JOHN PODHORETZ

August 7, 2007 -- THE partisans began lining up their argu ments of conven ience almost immediately after the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis.

The calamity was President Bush's fault, said newly minted Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, because we were spending so much money in Iraq. Sen. John McCain, enemy of pork, said Congress was at fault because of the way it earmarks money for transportation projects.

As quickly as they were floated, these arguments were abandoned in what seems to be a commendable display of delicacy and restraint - at a time when both are in horribly short supply whenever there's political advantage to be seized.

But in this case, anger is an appropriate response, and it is proper for that anger to be directed at government - government at all levels.

Through the normal wear and tear of the years - wear and tear that was measured and is measurable - the bridge, dubbed the St. Anthony Bridge, was a disaster waiting to happen. And it happened.

It happened despite a massive, 46 percent increase in federal support for Minnesota roads in the 2005 transportation bill - which provided the state with $1.1 billion over five years.

It happened despite inspections, the most recent in May.

There is, literally, no excuse for an event like this. The levee breach in New Orleans two years ago occurred because of an act of God - a flood caused by a hurricane. The Bay Bridge in San Francisco split open because of an earthquake.

For many people, the levee breach in New Orleans is the model of a government disaster. And it was. But what we saw there was government overwhelmed by the vast rescue and salvage effort.

In this case, a bridge collapsed during rush hour for no external reason other than it just gave out. And that is a greater outrage than the aftermath of Katrina.

Why? Boil down government to its basics, and they are the maintenance of public safety and the upkeep of publicly owned spaces and services.

To maintain public safety, we have armies (to defend us from external threats), police forces (to protect us from criminals) and firefighters. That's part of the reason we pay taxes to government in the first place.

The other part is to keep up publicly shared spaces and utilities - parks, streets, reservoirs, water tunnels, sewage tunnels and the like.

Government properly requires all citizens to share in defraying the cost of these expenses because it supplies them to everyone without question.

The social compact here is simple: We give the money to government, and all we ask in return is that these publicly shared responsibilities and resources are properly maintained.

Maintenance is necessary but boring, and since government is made up of human beings who abhor boredom, few elected officials or high-level managers are all that interested in this mundane task. Instead, they want to do big, exciting, bold new things - things they can claim for their own.

And in the past half-century, American government has redefined its core responsibilities. No longer does government exist for the purposes of maintenance and upkeep. Instead, it is seen as a means - perhaps the only significant means - of healing social flaws and reweaving the social fabric.

In the process, as the social scientist Nathan Glazer once said, we have become more interested in having government do the sorts of things nobody knows how to do (cure poverty) and less interested in ensuring that government master the sorts of technical tasks it used to do pretty well.

Under these conditions, government workers and elected officials aren't given much credit for just keeping things going - for doing the invisible but necessary work of ensuring that bridges don't just fall down.

Maybe that's why the attack on government faded so quickly after the tragedy last week - because this isn't just a failure of government. It's a failure of the citizenry - of all of us.

jpodhoretz@gmail.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Infrastructure Gridlock
By Randal O'Toole
Published 8/10/2007 12:07:56 AM

In the wake of the Minneapolis bridge disaster, transportation journalists are searching for local bridges in danger of collapse. This is already stimulating proposals for huge tax increases for new infrastructure.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the U.S. has a $1.5 trillion backlog of infrastructure projects. But this number should be taken with a grain of salt, as it merely sums the wish lists of more than a dozen different interest groups. Efforts to fulfill these wishes would become pork fests providing absolutely no assurance that money will be spent where it is really needed.

The problem is not inadequate funding. The real problem with deteriorating bridges and highways is a ponderous transportation planning process under which it takes decades to do anything.

Case in point: a 2004 inspection of the Sellwood bridge in my old hometown of Portland found it so riddled with cracks that engineers closed it to trucks and buses. In a sane world, they would have started building a replacement right away.

In fact, a private company offered to replace it by 2010, but local planners rejected the proposal. They expect to take until at least 2017 to plan and build a replacement.

Moreover, the planning process allowed parochial local interests to prevail over the best interests of the region as a whole. A recent Portland news article quotes a Sellwood neighborhood resident saying that, when they finally do replace the Sellwood Bridge, the new one cannot have any more capacity than the old because "we're not interested in becoming a freeway" for people who live outside the neighborhood.

This is an all-too familiar refrain. In 2001, the Oregon legislature approved the replacement of hundreds of Oregon bridges. But, even though Oregon's population has more than doubled since most of those bridges were built, transportation planners decided no new bridge should have any more capacity than the bridge it replaced.

Automobiles provide more than 80 percent of American passenger travel and have greatly contributed to our wealth, health, and social well-being. Yet transportation planning in too many cities has been taken over by anti-auto groups aiming to divert billions of dollars of highway user fees to rail transit projects that will never carry more than 1 or 2 percent of urban travel.

In 1996, for example, Minneapolis-St. Paul planners decided that future "expansions of roadways will be very limited" in that region. "As traffic congestion builds," planners hoped, "alternative travel modes will become more attractive."

Since I35-W is one of the most congested routes in the Twin Cities, proposals to replace and expand the bridge there would have been opposed by anti-auto interests. Instead, they built a costly light-rail line that actually increased congestion on parallel highways.

Rail transit offers an illusion of being environmentally sound. But today's cars are as safe, clean, and energy efficient as any transit system in the country. If we need to reduce greenhouse gases, we will do it through new auto technologies, not by reducing our automobility.

As a matter of principle, infrastructure spending should be based on markets and user fees, not political whims and caprices. If users are not willing to pay the cost, we don't need the infrastructure. But when users will pay, government shouldn't prevent them from getting the facilities they need.

Local, state and national legislators who want to meet America's transportation needs should replace transportation planning laws that delay needed improvements with systems of user fees that ensure funding for the things we really need -- like bridges that don't fall down.

Ellie