US Facing Transportation Infrastructure Crisis
The collapse of the I-90 bridge in Minnesota last year brought questions about public infrastructure to the forefront of the news cycle. Those questions, however, had been growing in the mind of experts for years before that. Ernst and Young, in conjuction with the Urban Land Institute, has issued a new report on the state of the world’s transportation infrastructure.
The status quo increasingly looks like a precarious option.
The report examines both global trends and the state of individual country’s transportation networks. The report cites five keydevelopments:
- The globalizing economy concentrates transportation hubs at a shrinking number of international gateway centers, where airports, ports, and road systems become overloaded bottlenecks.
- New global pathways simultaneously bypass secondary and tertiary regions, changing their relevence in transport schemes.
- India and China are working on their transportation frameworks in a manner that they know will produce an unnaceptably large carbon footprint.
- America’s fast growing sunbelt metropolitan areas are victims of fragmented planning and face “daunting challenges” in upgrading their transportation schemes.
- The housing downturn is also putting a dent in the U.S. state and local government budgets as slower home sales translate into lower permitting fees, real estate transfers, and taxes.”
Interestingly, current trends are putting more power in the hands of national governments, as local plans take a back seat to larger transportation infrastructure plans.
Urban density has proved to be an ever-increasing problem. In China, for instance, the urban population grew by amounts greater than France’s total population in just three years.
In the US, meanwhile, a continued deterioration of infrastructure would create significant drags on the economy and on the quality of life, the report says. Substantially higher gas taxes and congestion pricing may be needed to deal with the problem, as spending on infrastructure as a percentage of GDP has declined:
The report also predicts Congress will lift the ban on toll networks on interstate highways.
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