America's transport infrastructure: Life in the slow lane

[marmar]

from The Economist:



Life in the slow lane
Americans are gloomy about their economy’s ability to produce. Are they right to be? We look at two areas of concern, transport infrastructure and innovation

Apr 28th 2011




ON FRIDAY afternoons, residents of Washington, DC, often find a clear route out of the city as elusive as a deal to cut the deficit. Ribbons of red rear-lights stretch off into the distance along the highways that radiate from the city’s centre. Occasionally, adventurous southbound travellers experiment with Amtrak, America’s national rail company. The distance from Washington to Raleigh, North Carolina (a metropolitan area about the size of Brussels) is roughly the same as from London’s St Pancras Station to the Gare du Nord in Paris. But this is no Eurostar journey.

Trains creep out of Washington’s Union Station and pause at intervals, inexplicably, as they travel through the northern Virginia suburbs. In the summer, high temperatures threaten to kink the steel tracks, forcing trains to slow down even more. Riders may find themselves inching along behind a lumbering freight train for miles at a time, until the route reaches a side track on which the Amtrak train can pass. The trip takes six hours, well over twice as long as the London-Paris journey, if there are no delays. And there often are.

America, despite its wealth and strength, often seems to be falling apart. American cities have suffered a rash of recent infrastructure calamities, from the failure of the New Orleans levees to the collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis, to a fatal crash on Washington, DC’s (generally impressive) metro system. But just as striking are the common shortcomings. America’s civil engineers routinely give its transport structures poor marks, rating roads, rails and bridges as deficient or functionally obsolete. And according to a World Economic Forum study America’s infrastructure has got worse, by comparison with other countries, over the past decade. In the WEF 2010 league table America now ranks 23rd for overall infrastructure quality, between Spain and Chile. Its roads, railways, ports and air-transport infrastructure are all judged mediocre against networks in northern Europe.

America is known for its huge highways, but with few exceptions (London among them) American traffic congestion is worse than western Europe’s. Average delays in America’s largest cities exceed those in cities like Berlin and Copenhagen. Americans spend considerably more time commuting than most Europeans; only Hungarians and Romanians take longer to get to work (see chart 1). More time on lower quality roads also makes for a deadlier transport network. With some 15 deaths a year for every 100,000 people, the road fatality rate in America is 60% above the OECD average; 33,000 Americans were killed on roads in 2010. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.economist.com/node/18620944?story_id=18620944

[Liberal_in_LA]

1. k&r

[taterguy]

2. Infrastructure is way-cool

[SoCalDem]

3. Post war Americans chose to live outside cities and to be commuters

Now we live with that legacy. Where people outside of town were called farmers.ranchers, now they just create new towns and keep moving further out as those towns grow & merge..

Sprawl is ruining us all..

[WatsonT]

4. Although high gas prices may ultimately change that

cheap gas enabled suburbia (a blight on mankind).

Maybe it will take expensive gas to turn that back in to farmland and push most people back in to within the cities.

[taterguy]

6. Never underestimate how much money people are willing to pay to stay away from undesirables

[WatsonT]

7. Oh I'm sure

and the rich will always have their villas. But if it gets pricey enough it won't even be an option for the middle class that makes up much of the urban sprawl.

/how much sense does it make to turn productive farmland in to half acre lots?

[taterguy]

8. Our economy will collapse and we'll have armageddon before we abandon the suburbs

Sure, it would make sense to organize society in a more sustainable fashion, but that would mean admitting we were wrong and there's no way in hell we're gonna do that.

[WatsonT]

5. Didn't we get promised something about infrastructure spending?

Something like a trillion dollars to stimulate the economy?

Oh right, most of that went to wallstreet, and those guys have private jets so no need for better transportation.