A judge recently signed off on an agreement between New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority and disability-rights advocates. The MTA committed to making 95 percent of its subway stations elevator accessible … by 2055, when my youngest son will be 62 years old. That’s more than six decades after passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Even then, the system will still not be 100 percent accessible.
According to The New York Times, “Transit officials have said engineering concerns, construction time and costs all necessitate a long-term plan.”
It’s not just New York City’s subways. It’s high-speed rail. Power transmission lines. Affordable housing. And more.
Nor is the United States commercializing and mass-producing technologies it invented, like nuclear technology, solar cells or wind turbines. Another striking example of relative decline: the U.S. no longer builds the world’s tallest buildings.
How about power lines. It’s not enough to generate clean power with solar cells or windmills or geothermal. New sources of power must be connected to electric grid—which includes an application process that takes years and grid upgrades that are so expensive that many projects don’t pan out.
Or take high-speed rail: “Outside Amtrak’s 28 miles of 150-m.p.h. track in rural Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the American rail network is largely limited to speeds of 110 m.p.h. or less.”
Crumbling roads, deteriorating bridges, congested highways, poor public transportation, a housing shortage that drives rents and sale prices upward all prompt many to ask why? Why can’t a country that pioneered the steel-wire suspension bridge, the world’s largest subway system, the first concrete paved highway, the internal engine powered bus and mass-produced suburban housing do such things efficiently and affordably today?
Have we reached the point where the United States can’t do big things anymore, like the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, the Apollo missions, Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project or the Normandy invasion? If this is indeed the case, what happened?
Whether we’re speaking of critical infrastructure, mass transit or affordable housing, the United States’ ability to build cheaply and quickly has tanked.
Why can peer countries accomplish what the U.S. can’t? Why is it that American infrastructure projects often cost five to six times what they cost in other developed countries?
None of these questions is academic. When the public or politicians dismiss a question as purely academic, they mean that that the issue is of only theoretical interests. But the question about why the U.S. can’t build critical infrastructure is anything but purely theoretical. It’s utterly practical. Whether we’re speaking of the green transition or addressing homelessness or expanding enrollment at UC Berkeley, construction is imperative. Yet the barriers seem insuperable.
It turns out that neither higher land costs nor labor costs explain the difference. So what does?
To many small-government, low-tax conservatives, the explanations are painfully obvious: onerous and inflexible regulations, powerful unions, needless litigation, a flawed, tortuously slow (or corrupt) bidding process, frequent change orders, pork-barrel spending and featherbedding work rules. But this explanation has an obvious flaw: labor unions are even stronger in Europe and government regulation is even tighter.
To many on the left, much blame lies in the lack of adequate and secure long-term funding, which prevents government from developing the capacity to plan, construct and maintain major infrastructure projects.
Other policy pundits attribute excessively high costs to anti-building rules that reflect Not In My Backyard attitudes. Or an “everything bagel liberalism”—the refusal to privilege one priority over others.
There’s some truth to these claims, but much of the problem lies elsewhere.
Unlike the interstate highway system, which was the product of a clearly defined vision, implementation strategy, measurable outcome and sustained investment, the U.S. today is less willing to remove obstacles that impede the development of an improved electrical grid, expanded mass transit or new housing or to provide long-term funding reflecting the absence of a political consensus.
In New York City, subway costs could have been contained if stations were more compact or if designs and equipment were more uniform or if various city and state agencies were more willing to cooperate or if less planning and project management were outsourced to expensive consultants or if project funding were more stable.
The challenges facing higher education are not wholly dissimilar from those facing infrastructure, housing and health care, the sectors that cost much more in the United States than elsewhere.
Let’s look at three areas where higher ed is currently dysfunctional but could significantly improve performance.
So what lessons might higher education draw from the scholarship on infrastructure?
For all the concern about lagging infrastructure development, there are areas where innovation in the United States thrives, most notably in medicine. Michael Milken, the 1980s “junk bond king,” recently described some promising medical breakthroughs, including statins, genome sequencing, immunotherapies, monoclonal antibodies, anti-retroviral cocktails, robotic surgeries, CRISPR gene editing, mRNA vaccines and cell therapy.
Thus, whatever stagnation is taking place, it’s not universal. It’s ultimately a matter of priority setting. The U.S. no longer feels a need to erect the world’s tallest buildings as a status symbol. Medical treatments, in contrast, are a high national priority—even if medical care remains inequitably distributed.
When everything seems critical or urgent, in reality nothing’s essential. The challenge higher ed faces is to identify each campus’ core challenges and strategic priorities and then mobilize faculty and staff and institutional resources to address those pressing challenges with a laser-like focus. Otherwise, those challenges will go unmet, whatever your campus might claim.
The AI boom has catapulted Nvidia’s stock to an all-time high. The GPUs by Nvidia are the best-in-class hardware for supporting AI work
Maryland State Retirement and Pension System has made $250m (€230.6m) worth of infrastructure commitments through funds managed by DigitalBridge Partners and
A coalition of environmental advocacy groups will petition the Biden administration to propose rules that require stricter enforcement for cleaning up left
The newly-launched Investment Dashboard allows users to explore infrastructure projects across t