Third World America (12 page)

Then there is Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who in 2008 teamed up with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to form Building America’s Future (BAF), a bipartisan coalition looking, in Rendell’s words, to “deliver a message to Washington that if America is going to have a future, an economically viable future, a quality-of-life future, a future that involves public safety, we have to begin the business of repairing infrastructure.”
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In a February 2010 speech at an economic conference, Rendell warned, “If we don’t do something quickly, by the time 2030 rolls around, America will be a second-rate economic power.”
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Telling the businessmen in the room that “nothing significant will change until the businessmen step up,” he urged: “We need entrepreneurs to step up and say, ‘Guys, we’re having the living daylights beaten out of us. If we don’t do something quickly, we’re sunk—we’re a cooked goose.’ ”

The Flintstones, a cooked goose, a collapsing empire, a Third World nation. Pick your metaphor. They all translate into the same takeaway: The stakes for America couldn’t be higher.

By the beginning of 2009, in the wake of the economic meltdown and the election of Barack Obama, it looked like investing money in a massive infrastructure-spending plan would be that rarest of things these days in American politics: a win-win initiative with bipartisan support.

With the economy in desperate need of a boost, building roads, updating our electrical grid, and repairing bridges, dams, and levees could create millions of high-paying jobs—jobs that would have to be located in America and couldn’t be outsourced. According to Department of Transportation estimates, 47,500 jobs would be created for every $1 billion the government spends on highway improvements alone.
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In addition, it could also produce what Rendell described as “a whole boatload of orders for American steel and concrete and timber companies.…
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it would be a huge shot in the arm for the economy, probably the best economic stimulus you could do.”

As the debate over the stimulus began, Tom Friedman, knowing the need and seeing the opportunity, declared: “The next few months are among the most important in U.S. history.”
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But our leaders certainly didn’t act like that was the case. Instead of focusing on infrastructure and job creation—and the gravity of the crisis at hand—we got a load of business-as-usual partisan bickering, special interest lobbying, and pork barrel spending.

The result was a bill Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who was instrumental in transitioning the economic system of the former Soviet Union, called “a fiscal piñata,” an “astounding mish-mash of tax cuts, public investments, transfer payments and special treats for insiders,” and “a grab bag of hasty short-run spending.”
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In the end, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allotted only $72 billion to infrastructure projects.
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“I fear that we may soon look back and say that we missed a huge chance to go bigger and bolder,” Van Jones, author of
The Green
Collar Economy
, told me at the time the bill was being debated.
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“After all, there were three flaws with the old economy that has crashed: It favored consumption over production; debt over smart savings; and environmental damage over environmental renewal. Some parts of the stimulus package seem to be more of the same—trying to prop up the old, failed economy. That strategy simply won’t work—but we could waste a lot of money and time trying. Instead, we need a new direction for our economy.”

Faced with an even more devastating economic crisis, FDR responded with a large-scale public works program, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps—programs that gave us much of the infrastructure that needs to be updated today.
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But instead of doing something similar—and instead of constructing a new economic vessel capable of navigating the stormy seas of the twenty-first century—we chose to grab a bucket and try to bail out the old sinking ship.

Moving forward, the price we’ll pay for getting it wrong is extremely high. Think of a patient suffering from a grave viral infection who is treated with antibiotics, effective only against bacterial infections. Not only will the treatment be unsuccessful, it will also dangerously delay the proper care.

Extending the medical metaphor just a tad longer: Having failed to treat our ailment properly, we must continue to deal
with the symptoms that rage all around us. What follows are the results of our nation’s latest infrastructure checkup. The prognosis is definitely not good.

Let’s start this examination of what’s ailing America with that most elemental of elements: water. No society can survive without clean water. It’s essential for life and civilization (imagine the Roman Empire without its aqueducts). Clean, fresh water is so essential that many believe that, in the coming decades, wars will be fought over it. Among them is Steven Solomon, author of
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
, who believes the world can be divided into water haves and water have-nots (Egypt, China, and Pakistan are among the have-nots).
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“Consider what will happen,” he writes, “in water-distressed, nuclear-armed, terrorist-besieged, overpopulated, heavily irrigation-dependent and already politically unstable Pakistan when its single water lifeline, the Indus River, loses a third of its flow from the disappearance of its glacial water source.”

Despite the indispensable nature of water, America’s drinking-water system is riddled with aging equipment that has been in the ground for one hundred years—or longer.
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Indeed, some of the nation’s tap water continues to run through cast-iron pipes built during the Civil War.
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As a result of leaking pipes, we lose an estimated seven billion gallons of clean water every day.
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According to a
New York Times
analysis of data from the Environmental Protection Agency, “a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country.”
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Washington, D.C., averages a water line break every day.
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“We have about two million miles of pipe in this nation,” says
Steve Allbee of the EPA.
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“If you look at what we’re spending now and the investment requirements over the next twenty years, there’s a $540 billion difference.”

Even now, our tap water is becoming less and less safe to drink—in some places our citizens are already forced to fetch fresh water from tanks stored on the back of trucks, our version of the Third World communal pump.
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Meanwhile, America’s wastewater treatment facilities are also fast deteriorating. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, “Older systems are plagued by chronic overflows during major rainstorms and heavy snowmelt and are bringing about the discharge of raw sewage into U.S. surface waters.
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The EPA estimated in August 2004 that the volume of combined sewer overflows discharged nationwide is 850 billion gallons per year. Sanitary sewer overflows, caused by blocked or broken pipes, result in the release of as much as 10 billion gallons of raw sewage yearly.”

The wall between fresh water and tainted water has become increasingly porous.

Next up, electricity. America is an increasingly wired society. Advances in technology mean more electronic devices—and more demand for energy. Yet the delivery of electricity today doesn’t differ much from the way it was done more than a hundred years ago when Thomas Edison brought the first commercial power grid online in New York.

While demand for electricity has risen 25 percent since 1990, the construction of transmission plants has dropped 30 percent.
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Since we need all the power we can get, companies are finding it nearly impossible to take facilities offline for proper maintenance—leading to breakdowns and unplanned outages.
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These ongoing brownouts and blackouts—some lasting seconds, some lasting days—result in more than $80 billion in commercial losses a year.
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The ASCE estimates that it could take as much as $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion over the next twenty years to fully update and expand the grid.
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On August 14, 2003, we got a glimpse of what we can expect a lot more of if we don’t make that investment.
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That muggy Thursday, an estimated fifty-five million Americans and Canadians living in a nearly four-thousand-mile stretch from Michigan to Connecticut and Canada lost power in the largest blackout in North American history. In New York, traffic ground to a halt when 11,600 stoplights cut out, and stalled subways and trains stranded four hundred thousand commuters throughout the evening and into the night. The city was plunged into darkness. The impact was felt across the northern corridor of our country, from high-rise elevators to airports and communication networks. What happened? Power lines, heavy from increased demand, dipped into overgrown trees in Ohio, which triggered a series of malfunctions that led to the shutdown of at least 265 power plants throughout the Northeast.
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America’s roads are also in miserable shape, with a third of the country’s roadways rated “poor” or “mediocre.”
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Again, our demand has far outstripped our capacity to meet it. From 1980 to
2005, the miles traveled by cars increased 94 percent (for trucks, mileage increased 105 percent).
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Yet there was only a 3.5 percent increase in highway lane miles.

But you don’t need those numbers to know that our roads are badly congested. You see it—and experience it—every day. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Infrastructure Report Card, “Americans spend 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic at a cost of $78 billion a year—$710 a year for each motorist.”
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City drivers have it particularly bad: They are stuck in traffic over 40 percent of their time on the road.
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In studying car crashes across the country, the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC) determined that badly maintained or managed roads are responsible for $217 billion in car crashes annually—far more than headline-grabbing alcohol-related accidents ($130 billion) or speed-related pileups ($97 billion).
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But Americans are paying an even higher price for our deteriorating roads: According to the TCC, 53 percent of the forty-two thousand road fatalities each year are at least partially the result of poor road conditions.
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We are currently spending $70 billion annually on improving our highways—nowhere near the $186 billion a year that is needed.
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It’s a collision of need versus resources; for far too many of us, it can be fatal.

There’s an additional twist on the traffic story. Over the past decade, high housing prices have forced many middle-class
families to move farther and farther away from the overpriced cities they work in. Doing so has meant ever-longer commutes.

By the year 2000, each day, 3.5 million Americans headed out on “extreme commutes,” defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as travel times to and from work of three hours or more each day.
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That is twice the number of extreme commuters there were in 1990. One in eight workers—17.5 million Americans—are now out their front doors every morning and on their way to work by 6 A.M. For more and more of the middle class, life now consists of sleep, an arduous commute, work, another arduous commute, then back to sleep.
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These stressed-out Americans turbo-charge their long journeys to work with PowerBars, vats of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee … and loneliness. Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, found that there is a direct connection between the duration of a person’s commute and their sense of social isolation.
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By his calculations, every ten minutes of commuting results in 10 percent fewer social connections. “Commuting,” Putnam says, “is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.” A study by Swiss economists at the University of Zurich discovered that commuters with a one-hour commute each way need to earn 40 percent more than noncommuters just to pull even with the noncommuters’ level of satisfaction with their lives.
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It puts a whole new spin on the phrase “driven to succeed.”

America’s railway system is speeding down the tracks … in reverse.
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It’s one of the few technologies that has actually regressed over the past eighty years.

Tom Vanderbilt of
Slate.com
came across some pre–World War II train timetables and made a startling discovery: Many train rides in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s took less time than those journeys would today. For instance, in 1934, the Burlington Zephyr would get you from Chicago to Denver in around thirteen hours. The same trip takes eighteen hours today. “The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s,” Vanderbilt writes, “took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak’s Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours.”

At the moment, the only high-speed train in the United States is Amtrak’s Acela, which travels the Washington–New York–Boston line.
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And I use the term “high-speed” very loosely. While in theory the trains have a peak speed of 150 miles per hour, the average speed on the Northeast Acela route is just 71 miles per hour, with its trains frequently stuck behind slower-moving ones on the heavily traveled tracks.
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Meanwhile, countries such as Japan, France, and Italy all have reliable train services that surpass 200 miles per hour.
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Same with China. For example, the six-hundred-mile ride between Wuhan and Guangzhou is completed in three hours by bullet trains reaching 217 miles per hour; the airport rail link in Shanghai reaches a top speed of 268 miles per hour.
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