An American infrastructure plan

Infrastructure is as American as apple pie, or at least it would seem so from the reliable applause line that a political speech writer can get by the mere inclusion of the word, as in “rebuild America’s infrastructure with American hands,” a variation of which has been used by presidents of both parties. Americans, let’s stop being patsies, and let’s hold our elected officials to a higher standard when it comes to this basic and essentially bipartisan issue.

Step one, let’s make them stop calling it “infrastructure.” America doesn’t have an infrastructure problem. It has a problem with infrastructure upkeep: the maintenance and repair of a vast existing inventory of civil works, most of which were build in the last 100 or so years. This is frankly a disgrace. Rome still functions after a few thousand years. But let’s call it what it really is: a health and safety issue. Drinking water purity is inadequate in places like Flint. Bridges are in disrepair, risking the lives of travelers and negatively impacting the flow of commerce.

{mosads} Calling it “infrastructure” makes it sound like a complex undertaking involving sophisticated planning choices, conflates the immediate need with a long-running debate about the role of private finance and suggests that it is a choice rather than a necessity. Make them call it a health and safety issue or even an “emergency health and safety crisis” and just get it done.

Step two, fix that stuff immediately. Almost all of these things are owned and operated by state or local government and all that is required to get the work done is a mandate from Washington to do it, just as Washington mandates the level of treatment of wastewater and so many other things. The country needs more infrastructure regulation, not less. The necessary level of repair can be mandated, and it will get done, with the state and local governments deciding how to best shoulder the costs as they grumble about the burden.

Some of these things are both of regional or super-regional significance and too expensive for just one or a few state or local governments to undertake. These undertakings justify a federal funds supplement. So just do that, too. These sums are quite modest in the scheme of the massive federal budget.

Step three, after we address this emergency health and safety crisis, it’s time to just stop. What comes next is actual infrastructure, massive new “greenfield” infrastructure developments, and I sincerely suggest that we take a little time off before we rush forward to do any of that. I have two reasons for suggesting this infrastructure hiatus.

First, it will require a massive mobilization of the construction industry and a huge amount of spending to implement all the needed emergency health and safety fixes. Also, doing this amount of work will negatively impact mobility and private investment during the multi-year construction period as a result of necessary detours and service shutdowns. Give the country a little break. Second, true infrastructure is expensive and long term. It changes population patterns and life choices. The decision about what to build requires long-range thinking, not addressing the present but understanding what will shape and serve the future. So let’s make some better plans.

The world is going through a period of rapid transition now, with technology changing the way we live. Chose to believe it or not, climate change will meaningfully impact our lives in ways we are just beginning to understand. Despite political and cultural resistance, the nation is becoming more urban, less about manufacturing and, within the coming decades, less about oil and gas extraction and distribution, and more about distributed renewable power generation, electric and self-driving cars, greener and smarter cities and maybe companies with distributed workforces, massively changing where and how we work and live.

While every generation sees its time as one of great change, it is certainly valid to see the coming years as a time of particular change in the way the population will need infrastructure given the force of disruption brought about by technology and the dual demands of climate change. There is a need to transition the sources of and use of fuel and to reconfigure land use to respond to the climate change for which it is already too late to prevent. New planning strategies and technologies are just being developed and tested that address these challenges, including next generation power transmission, mass transit systems, storm barriers, and ever higher speed data.

Once we set about to fix what we have, it will be a good time to pause, engage a new generation of engineers and planners to imagine and plan the future, let pass the current political climate which is in the throes of a reactionary embrace of a rural smokestack industrial past, stop chasing Dubai and China, and get it right. Real infrastructure is too expensive and too important to reduce to a sound bite.

Joel Moser is the founder and chief executive officer of Aquamarine Investment Partners, a global real asset investor, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also teaches infrastructure development and finance practices at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.