Infrastructure Improvements Are Not Optional

In the summer of 1982 I had a summer job selling cable television door-to-door in Pittsburgh. Having never been to the city before arriving on my first day in my yellow VW Scirocco I had no idea how bad the roads and bridges were. Since my job sent me all over the city from one day to the next I depended on the kindness of my co-workers to give me to low down on what the neighborhoods were like.

Most of the time people would tell me if they were safe or if there were good places to get dinner, but one of my fellow sales people only used to tell me which bridges to avoid. At first I thought it was a traffic warning, but I came to understand that he was more concerned about a chunk of metal falling on my car from the overhead bridge suspension. Apparently most of the bridges in Pittsburgh back that were well past their useful life with few plans to replace them.

I did notice terrible potholes and dangerous curved exit ramps, but thankfully no loose bridge parts ever fell on me or my car. Sadly I did that car in myself one night going home from a company get together.

In 2007 when the Minneapolis bridge fell into the river I immediately thought of all those Pittsburgh bridges, thankful I had lived that summer. Infrastructure is something that has been an ongoing problem in our country ever since roads started.

No one ever likes to pay for up keep, but upkeep we must. I heard a story on the radio yesterday about home ownership that said that homeowners need to plan on spending between 1-3% of the value of their house on upkeep a year. I’m not talking about mowing the grass, but replacement of systems and infrastructures, like HVAC and reroofing. Sounds about right to me. This year I replaced one HVAC unit that was about 1% of the value of our house. One unit and I am already at the baseline.

So it only makes sense that the Government needs to do the same upkeep on all public works, like roads, bridges, government owned building and parks. The fact that we have not been keeping up with the upkeep must end. The good news is that infrastructure improvements are good American jobs. You can’t make a new road in West Virginia in China. And the infrastructure all over the whole country needs upgrading so that spreads out the work everywhere.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves and invest in our own safety and comfort by having the infrastructure we need. I don’t want to have to depend on the advice of local as to which bridges to avoid if I don’t want to risk having it fall in the river as I am driving over it.