Infrastructure: How Would You Spend $1.6 Trillion?

“China spends 9 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on infrastructure and India budgets 3.5 percent … while aiming to increase its allocation to 8 percent. By comparison, the United States budgets $112.9 billion or just 0.93 percent of its GDP, and sidesteps the reality of a ballooning $1.6 trillion deficit for necessary upgrades over the next five years.”
—Infrastructure 2007: A Global Perspective

In the reportInfrastructure 2007: A Global Perspective, published last May, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and Ernst & Young assess the state of the world's infrastructure as we reach a turning point in world history: For the first time, one out of two people on the planet lives in a city. Now more than ever, effective systems of public infrastructure are crucial for societies' health as populations grow and resources are squeezed. But in many countries, including the United States, public infrastructure is underfunded and under strain. The ULI estimates that it would cost $1.6 trillion to make needed upgrades to America's infrastructure.

Hard problems demand creative solutions, so ARCHITECT asked a range of experts—architects, engineers, planners, nonprofit leaders, elected officials, and critics—how they'd fix America's infrastructure if they had the chance (and $1.6 trillion to spend). Click through the pages for their responses.

Privatize—and Demand Private Investment
As the so-called Highway Trust Fund is set to go bankrupt as early as 2009, private investment firms are gearing up for partnerships, which could be a positive step, if handled sensibly. What we need to avoid are items such as the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), which is phase one of the NAFTA superhighway. The Spanish firm Cintra is set to take over toll collections after the TTC's completion; however, it is unclear that they'll have any obligations for maintenance. The cost is being socialized, while the profit is privatized, effectively making the American people pay for it twice.

Infrastructure, in a capitalist model, is an asset worthy of maintaining to ensure continuity of revenue. In a government-controlled model, infrastructure is nothing but a cumbersome liability. This should be taken into consideration when developing plans to keep our current infrastructure safe.

Privatization should be used to encourage maintenance and safety, and private companies should truly invest and bear the upfront costs in return for ability to collect tolls or usage fees in some form. But public/private partnerships that look more like corporate welfare must be avoided.
—Ron Paul, U.S. congressman from Texas and Republican presidential candidate

Depave the Parking Lot and Put Back Paradise
We would spend less time fixing and more time dismantling America's infrastructure. The 50-year suburban experiment in car culture is untenable in the face of climate change and projections of peak oil. Urbanism needs to embrace ecology, and urbanists need to recapture the exuberance of visionaries from Charles Fourier to Buckminster Fuller in the creation of new models for sustainable and localized communities.

We would spend the $1.6 trillion on five important eco-urbanist projects. First, a systematic study of the suburbs identifying those which can be densified as new cities and those which can be returned to farmland: There is no middle ground in Ecotopia.

Second, the reconstruction of a national rail network for people and goods and the elimination of trucking.

Third, a massive investment in ecological infrastructure, from solar fields to town-scaled water-filtering living machines.

Fourth, the expansion of farming universities; working land organically will become the future's (more satisfying) version of working at Wal-Mart.

Lastly, the re-establishment of the Jeffersonian grid as a national priority. Ban the cul-de-sac.

The final plea is something no money can buy: To abandon small ideas, banality in design, and the clinging to historicism in order to recapture a nonexistent past—and instead to channel courage, optimism, and humanism in the search for big and forward-looking solutions to contemporary issues.
—Dan Wood and Amale Andraos
Principals, WORK Architecture, New York

From the Silk Road to Mars Rovers
History's most successful cultures are those that planned ahead and invested in technologies and the infrastructure to support them. I've used NASA radar imaging to uncover ancient trade routes with wells and secure forts in the Mideast. These routes enabled cultures to prosper in the silk and incense markets. In the 1400s and 1500s, Spain, Portugal, and England rose to prominence with shipping fleets and maritime routes. Later on, trains, planes, and, ultimately, space travel helped shape the fortunes and status of various countries.

A technology is only as good as the infrastructure that supports it. NASA's two Mars rovers are valuable only because they can share their discoveries via powerful receivers on Earth that “talk to them.” We're already planning an interplanetary internet for communication among multiple spacecraft.

While the United States historically has invested heavily in traditional phone technology, India has emphasized wireless communications. I've had better cell phone reception in India than at home near Los Angeles. We are all so critically dependent on wireless communications—for financial, medical, transportation, energy, and other needs.
—Charles Elachi
Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA

Connectivity—Physical and Digital
A creative economy in the global age means connecting people and talent in urban centers. Investing the money in connectivity, both physical and digital, is important. We have to start by creating open access to talent and more efficient trade. We must elevate our airports to standards and examples set by cities such as Amsterdam, Sydney, Toronto, and Copenhagen. Finally, we have to invest money in a leadership and infrastructure that will drive open, connected, and tolerant communities. Our communities need to be completely wireless.
—Richard Florida, author, The Rise of the Creative Class

Create a Public-Realm Endowment
Recent headlines about crumbling infrastructure have grabbed the entire country's attention. But there is even more to the story than collapsing bridges (Minneapolis) and blown steam pipes (New York). The failure to invest in infrastructure is also causing major opposition to additional real estate development.

Residents of areas with overcrowded schools and heavily trafficked roads want to stop development, especially when they are asked to foot the bill for public investment in improved or expanded infrastructure and community facilities. The easy government response is to make developers pay an impact fee. This only increases the cost of buying a house and forces developers to move farther and farther into the countryside in search of cheap land and an escape from fees that can make homes prohibitively expensive to the middle class.

In many metropolitan areas across the United States, commuters are reaching the limit they are willing to travel in search of affordable residences. Consequently, real estate developers are reverting to higher-density infill development in older suburban areas—second growth. Here, too, existing communities are objecting to congestion and decline in their quality of life.

The inadequacy of the public realm and existing infrastructure, whether in areas of greenfield development or suburban second growth, can be corrected by public investment. The cost of that investment can be captured from the incremental increase in tax revenues. Consequently, I would not invest the $1.6 trillion directly in public construction.

I would use that money to create a public-realm endowment and offer the income from the endowment to communities to cover the cost of planning, design, and engineering, provided they establish a tax-increment district that will generate an income stream that is adequate to retire the debt on bonds that would finance public investment.
—Alex Garvin
President of Alex Garvin & Associates, New York, and adjunct professor of urban planning and management, Yale University

No Short Trips by Car—and Bike Racks for All
Our collective failure hasn't been the amount of money spent on transportation—it's how we invest it that's critical. For the health of individuals and our communities, we need to put the road builders on a diet and focus on maintenance of what we've got.

More than 40 percent of trips are two miles or less in this country, and yet 90 percent of these trips are made by car. We need to enable people to walk, bike, and take transit instead of driving for more of these short, polluting trips that are clogging up our streets. That means investment in complete streets (with bike lanes, bus lanes, and sidewalks), trails, and trains, together with the buildings and land uses that encourage these modes. We need to focus on access, not mobility for its own sake, and we need performance measures that reward and encourage less driving, not more.

On a slightly smaller scale, I long for the day when a simple $100 bike rack can be put at the front of a building without a second thought. And maybe some of that $1.6 trillion could go toward connecting the disjointed bicycle and trail networks that are emerging in most U.S. cities today, so we can play our part in tackling climate change, congestion, obesity, oil dependence, and air pollution.
—Andy Clarke, executive director, League of American Bicyclists

State DOTs Should Be Bold, Creative
I would instruct state departments of transportation to follow the lead of Maine and Minnesota in establishing creative partnerships with design and construction teams that can produce beautiful new structures in a reasonable amount of time.

When the suspension cables in Maine's historically significant and infrastructure-critical Waldo-Hancock Bridge were found by inspectors to be badly corroded, Maine's Department of Transportation had the structure strengthened for interim use while a replacement bridge was designed and constructed on the fast track. The new signature span has the unusual feature of an observatory in one of its towers, thereby giving the region both a distinctive new landmark and an impressive tourist attraction.

Unfortunately, Minnesota did not strengthen its I-35 bridge before it collapsed suddenly last August, but in the wake of the tragedy, the state Department of Transportation greatly accelerated the bidding process for a replacement. Giving proposals credit for aesthetics led to the awarding of a contract that will produce an attractive bridge in about 14 months.

Such bold, decisive, and creative thinking by departments of transportation can not only fix our infrastructure in a timely manner but also provide greatly added value by enhancing the built environment with beautiful structures.
—Henry Petroski
Professor of civil engineering and history, Duke University, and author of Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design

Sex, Rain Clouds, and Teleportation
A dense network of hydrogen-fueled magnetic fast trains with rainmaking devices is the immediate answer. Light rail should feed into the magnetic network from every community. Both interstate rail and light rail should multitask to seed clouds (for the upcoming water crisis) and to power windmills when they swoosh by.

Commuter vans and clean-fuel motorbikes, hydrofoils, bicycles, and canoes should be freely available at stations run by the National Park Service. There should be hitchhiking shelters equipped with showers and beds at all the stations.

Within every municipality there should be a tax-exempt 24-hour zone where everything is legal: drugs, sex, and music.

Following this immediate infrastructural change, emanating at the national level and integrated locally, we should mobilize a huge national will to make teleportation available to everyone.

Incidentally, New Orleans should float and become the first of our many future coastal Venices.
—Andrei Codrescu, author of New Orleans, Mon Amour

Get On Your Feet
Twentieth century culture has imagined lots of sci-fi forms of transportation: Disneyesque monorails, the supersonic slot cars from Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, the personal helicopters in Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City. Worried about road rage? Imagine sky rage. But to answer the transit question, don't go high-tech—or even low-tech. Go no-tech.

A 2005 Washington Post survey shows that while a large majority of commuters praise the convenience of transit systems such as the Washington Metro, they rarely use them. People love their independence. The problem is not traffic, it's commuting—not the form of it, but the fact of it.

In that same survey, one obvious form of transportation never came up: walking. Given the choice, wouldn't you rather stroll 15 minutes than sit bumper-to-bumper for 25? The challenge of public transportation is an opportunity for public health. The World Health Organization reports that a billion people are overweight because of fatty diets and inactivity, and suburban sprawl contributes to this because it limits casual exercise.

Let's invest in the infrastructure of the human body. To get people out of their cars and onto their feet, the means are simple: more mixed-use zoning; more medium-scale, high-density development; more trails and sidewalks; incentives for businesses to locate near residential areas and for individuals to work close to home; better public education about the health benefits of being active. We can solve the traffic problem and make better communities and healthier people at the same time.

We need Jane Jacobs, not George Jetson— less Buck Rogers and more Mr. Rogers.
—Lance Hosey
Director, William McDonough + Partners, Charlottesville, Va.

Make Mass Transit More Convenient
I would increase the funding for large-scale intercity and intracity mass transit projects to increase mobility of people at a smaller cost to the environment. Creating public-private partnerships with transit-product manufacturers to engineer a more evolved product is important as well. Ultimately, the biggest barrier to wider use of public transit is the convenience factor; increased funding for existing programs could expand capacity, frequency, and routes, which would promote their use.

Public transportation will become one of the most important components of our world as the population and its environmental awareness grow. We should fund decision making that will create available, convenient, environmentally responsible, and efficient transportation for all users and types.
—Morgan Landers
Chair of the Student Representative Council, American Planning Association, and graduate student, the University of Colorado, Denver

What to Fix and What Not to Build
I don't understand how we've let this country fall into disrepair. We've barely started to rebuild New Orleans. Amtrak has been hanging together by a thread for years. That bridge that fell down in Minnesota isn't being rebuilt yet.

How did this happen?

There are two things I wouldn't do with $1.6 trillion. I wouldn't build a toll road and sell it to foreign investors. And I wouldn't build a NAFTA superhighway. Americans should be the ones who benefit from the roads, bridges, railroads, airspace, and waterways they pay for.

Our roads are choking in traffic. We need to fix them and build more.

Amtrak is falling apart. We need to invest enough money to bring it into a state of good repair. Some of our ports are jammed. We need to expand them so port drivers don't wait in line for five hours to pick up a shipping container. Our biggest airports are overwhelmed by air traffic. We need to bring the airspace into the 21st century.

We need to make sure bridges don't fall down and airplanes don't crash. We must pay for people to inspect bridges and railroad tracks and airplane maintenance hangars.
—James P. Hoffa
General president, International Brotherhood of Teamsters

Invest in Government
Our nation has not invested as we must in roads, bridges, and transit—and our lack of investment has serious consequences. I say this as the mayor of a city recovering from a tragedy that was not an act of God, but a failure of man.

We should take this core lesson from the tragedy of the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis: When you invest in quality government, you get quality results. When you don't invest, there are consequences. Our country's highest priorities for investment include repairing our critical bridges, dramatically increasing and expanding transit options, and—as Minneapolis has done—offering high-quality public drinking water to residents.
—R.T. Rybak
Mayor of Minneapolis

Bolster Manufacturing, Sustainably
If I had a trillion dollars, to paraphrase the Barenaked Ladies, I'd first and foremost invest in the manufacturing base that has driven our nation's economy for more than a century. America has the technological know-how to produce thousands of consumer goods—including safe, efficient, high-quality cars and trucks—that equal or surpass the world's best. Our nation's factories need investment dollars to enable them to produce those goods and bring them to market in ways that are economically and environmentally sustainable.

Coupled with manufacturing investment, we must invest in the infrastructure that will bring alternative fuels to our neighborhoods. We can produce vehicles today that will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce our nation's carbon footprint. To make them practical and desirable, we must be able to plug in, refuel, or recharge in a safe and convenient manner.

Americans want to do the right thing environmentally and will put their transportation dollars where their hearts are as soon as it becomes practical for them to do so. We should do all we can to make that possible.
—Joe Hinrichs
Group vice president, global manufacturing, Ford Motor Co.

Urban Wish List
My wish list for modes of transportation, as an urban dweller and not so much as an architect:

• In the city, an extensive, high-frequency subway system (if not this, the bus is a good alternative): “extensive” meaning at any given point in the city you can find a station within 500 feet in any direction; “high-frequency” meaning a train comes every two minutes—and it ought to be on time.
• Continuous pedestrian and bicycle paths. It is best to have a Strida (a well-designed folding bike that I have) so you can take it on the subway. Maybe Segways can share the bicycle paths.
• A fast intercity railway that runs something like the bullet train in Japan or the TGV in France or the proposed Beijing–Shanghai maglev. Anyway, it should not take more than two hours to get to New York City from Boston. I will be happy to see the Amtrak trains in a museum somewhere.
• It's OK to drive after all, as long as it's in a Prius. One to three are the areas where money should be spent.

—Yung Ho Chang, professor and head of the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Redefine The Federal Strategy
The federal surface transportation programs have morphed from a major focus on building the interstate system to having almost no purpose other than doling out money to states and transit agencies. With the dual threats of climate change and rising energy costs, it is time to define the federal interest in transportation to incorporate these issues along with several others, such as our aging population and the globalization of trade.

Upcoming congressional authorizations for passenger rail, highway, and transit offer the chance to define a new transportation mission for intercity corridors, metropolitan areas, and the most vulnerable of our society: the elderly, disabled, and working families.
Anne P. Canby
President, Surface Transportation Policy Partnership

Invest to Grow
I would begin by investing that money, not spending it. We have to invest it so that the existing system can be a foundation for growth and expansion. We need to think about how to provide relevant intercity transportation that will attract riders as well as give both consumers and manufacturers choices, so we can exploit the comparative advantages of each mode of transportation to prevent congestion.

The social good of a national transportation system was our first great national economic priority. It is the great national economic enabler, and everyone knows when the system does poorly: We all wait a little bit longer, and we all pay a little bit more.

Our competitiveness depends in large part on our ability to keep costs down, and that takes investment. But the results of investment aren't invisible. You will see them in every store and in every town in America.
—Alex Kummant, president and CEO, Amtrak

Organic Logistics
The largest sector of infrastructure is the one dealing with logistics. As a living cell is an extraordinary set of micrologistics, so a megacity is an extraordinary set of macrologistics.

The logistics of contemporary industrialized man are extremely inefficient and wasteful, as our dump sites, offal of Homo rapax (rapacious man), testify. Maintaining and improving these modes only modifies what is dysfunctional—a too conservative approach. I call this pursuit of a “better kind of wrongness.”

As the nation's infrastructure now in disrepair is obsolete anyway, we need a serious conceptual reformulation of the whole system along realistic guidelines: not expanding roadways to accommodate ever-increasing traffic, but reformulating the damaging patterns of our communities, especially our promulgation of one- to two-story single-family homes. One house or mansion per family requires a logistical landscape horrendously wasteful and brutally anti-environmental—the nemesis of greenness. The automobile is both cause and consequence of the city's breakdown and the unavoidable materialism of suburbia. We must marginalize the automobile.

It might turn out that the human habitat has to be realigned with the logistical grids serving it. That would require urban ribbons of modest width incorporating parallel road, pedestrian, and bicycle pathways, and stations for local, regional, and continental transit.
—Paolo Soleri, founder, Arcosanti and the Cosanti Foundation, Paradise Valley, Ariz.

Fix Our Rusting Rails
We have a passenger railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. There's no big project that would do more to reduce America's oil consumption than restoring passenger rail service on a par with the other industrialized nations. And forget about high-speed or maglev for the moment—let's just get it going again at a normal speed.

Restoring passenger rail service would have many additional benefits. It would put tens of thousands of people to work at all levels, from labor to management. It would decongest airports that are overburdened from flights going only a few hundred miles (trips that are better served by rail anyway). It would help revive many central cities. The infrastructure for running it is lying out there, rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. It does not require the reinvention of anything.

This would give us confidence to go forward and make other necessary changes in a society facing a permanent oil crisis. The fact that we are not even talking about it shows how unserious we are.

Finally, the restored U.S. passenger rail system should be electrified so it can be run by means other than fossil fuels.
—James Howard Kunstler
Author, The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere

Go High-Tech and Low-Tech
Having just taken my first ride on Shanghai's maglev train from Pudong Airport, at slightly less than seven minutes' duration (as compared to nearly an hour by taxi a few days earlier), I would spend a good chunk of the $1.6 trillion on interurban rapid transit. How embarrassing for our vaunted technological prowess when our recently reintroduced flagship train on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor service, the Acela Express (sic), crawls into New York from Boston in slightly less than three and a half hours, three times longer than it might take the Shanghai maglev. Not too many of us will forgo the shuttle, or perhaps even the convenience of our cars, for such a hare.

At the other end of the technological and fiscal spectrum, I would invest in what many European cities now deploy: low-cost bike rental stations, easy to find and to leave the rental at one's destination. Until the Segway becomes ubiquitously (inexpensively) available, the old-fashioned bicycle can well support our short-distance commutes.

Whatever dollars are left, I would devote to teleportation or human e-mail research. But then just maybe some investment should be dedicated to reforming our land-use habits so that we wouldn't have to commute so far, so often.
— Alex Krieger
Professor of urban design, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, and principal of Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, Cambridge, Mass.

Conserve, Evolve
A broad view of infrastructure includes the essential resources of land and water. These should be identified and quantified for conservation, cultivation, and urbanization. Urbanization includes the full network of mobility, from national air and rail to local bicycles and walking. We already know that it is imperative to reduce the impacts of cultivation and urbanization on land and water and to reduce the need for transportation based on nonrenewable resources.

Five centuries ago, the most important component of built infrastructure was the city wall. Just as we no longer need such defenses, so might we look upon our vehicular dependence in the light of a historic evolution. All human constructs are capable of intentional adjustment. Transport can be reduced by providing land for agriculture within every metropolitan area and requiring urban patterns that support transit and enable walking.

Thus I would encourage triage with regard to repairing and maintaining the national vehicular infrastructure, so that resources could be allocated as well to the support of water quality and land for cultivation within metropolitan reach and to the development of a generous public transit system for the movement of goods and people.
—Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, principal, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., Miami, and dean, University of Miami School of Architecture

The Vision Thing
When one thinks of the great infrastructure projects in history, it was often a design vision that led to innovation.

The Hoover Dam is a great example. Most people think of it as a magnificent feat of engineering prowess. What is not realized is that the original design was so ponderous and unattractive, public officials insisted that an architect was needed to redesign and oversee the project. In 1933, architect Gordon B. Kaufmann was given the commission to rework the dam and make it cohesive. His dramatic concave form organized the functional elements, provided inspiration for millions, and popularized modernist design.

If we are going to create infrastructure that will truly carry us into the next century, we need this kind of imagination, and we need to ensure that architects are in leadership positions on infrastructure projects.
— Mark Strauss, principal, FXFowle Architects, New York

Wind and Water
Our continued growth places demands on public infrastructure. However, infrastructure will change and evolve because of technological advances. It will continue to provide new opportunities for better management of our water and wind resources; we need to capitalize on these with sustainability and green architecture.

Increasing our use of gray water within facilities is going to become a higher priority as well as harnessing wind for energy. Relying more on water retention for everyday needs should result in new infrastructure systems that are more environmentally friendly while utilizing a sometimes wasted resource. Wind energy may supplement some very generic building systems while easing fossil-fuel demands. It could spur a heavier use of wind farms, whose energy creates a network of new infrastructure.
—Curtis J. Moody
President, Moody
Nolan, Columbus, Ohio

Big Dig, Boondoggle?
Is America's infrastructure terminally ailing, or does it just need a twist of the compass and a refueling of priorities? Here in Boston, the home of the $14.5 billion Big Dig, observers and users of the mammoth tunnel project have concurred that, as the old saying goes, “Progress is not its most important product.”

For all the hard-topping, a truly walkable city and serviceable public infrastructure are still out of sight for many inhabitants and commuters stuck in traffic. Given the nation's overall $1.6 trillion infrastructure deficit, there must be a better way to end clogged highways and get travelers moving.

Or so goes the sentiment, while local observers— this writer among them—witness the ordeal of the city's interminable construction-cum-destruction project, only to see traffic multiply and no better options in rail mobility.

In short, there is precious little return on Boston's investment for those wanting to walk or ride on much-needed public transportation. In this project, at least, the axiom “If you build it, they will come” has proven true, to our detriment.
—Jane Holtz Kay
Author, Asphalt Nation