Building for the Future

Earlier this month president-elect Barack Obama announced that he intends to enact a new economic stimulus package to create 2.5 million jobs and help stabilize our flagging economy. This stimulus package is on a truly massive scale. Initial numbers ran in the $700 billion range, but more recent reports suggest $775 billion or eventually $1 trillion.

So the government is about to spend a gajillion dollars and the transition team is probably thinking up how to target the investments to get the most bang for the buck. Many have suggested using a chunk of it to help states or to fund proposed and planned infrastructure projects. Funding infrastructure projects has the benefit of putting large numbers of people directly to work in construction. Indirectly it will stimulate demand and create jobs in other sectors that supply materials as well as in service sectors as people spend the money they’re earning with their nifty construction jobs. 

 The biggest cause for concern in investing in existing planned projects is that we might be entrenching a problematic status quo or invest in scattered projects without an overarching vision that sets the tone for the future development of our country. If the portion of the package that is going towards infrastructure simply goes into repairing aging roads, maintaing bridges, and the odd new road project, it will do something to stimulate the economy, but it won’t change our trajectory. What we really need to do is rethink our infrastructure and use this money to launch our country into the next upswing. Eventually the economy will stop hemmoraging jobs and money and we’ll be out of the beta phase. The question is whether our recovery will be slow and our plateau lower or quicker and our eventual plateau higher. Essentially we have to ensure that this stimulus makes the country more competitive far into the future. If our investment stops at repair (we need the repair TOO) and small projects, we are just fixing our infrastructure so that we can compete in the 1970s, not the 2010s.

We need to invest with vision. A patchwork of uncoordinated projects won’t get us far, it’s got to be big, bold, and innovative. We need to invest in upgrading our roads, rail, universities, power grid, medical practices, and communications networks. A coordinated effort to upgrade our infrastructure would do all of these things in such a way that they work together seamlessly. We’re about to give America a $1 trillion makeover. Will the end result be Angelina Jolie or Michael Jackson?

Anyone who has driven in any of the more high traffic corridors of a major metro area can attest to the sorry state our roads are in. Traffic is backed up for miles at rush hour, potholes are common, and repairs are haphazard, unsightly, and always seem to be done at the worst times of the day. While we need to repair and improve our roads, we should also be careful that we do not increase access points too much otherwise the problems of today will be back within a decade as urban areas sprawl out to infinity with cheap houses made out of popsicle sticks and cardboard, “starter homes,” popping up in the exurban fringe. Roads are nifty and all, but they are part of our problem because part of why we are losing our competitive edge is that we can’t keep up with our infrastructure needs. It’s a hell of a lot harder to maintain hundreds of thousands of miles of road that is heavily trafficked than to maintain fewer roads with lighter traffic and mass transit systems. At a certain point the number of people using a transportation grid point is too low to pay for or justify creation and maintenance, but we seem to do it anyway, depriving more heavily trafficked areas of maintenance funds. New road projects should include innovative ideas like New York’s failed congestion pricing scheme that would have charged people to enter Manhattan below 60-somethingth street and put a portion of that money into mass transit projects. Other ideas floating around are converting HOV or Carpool lanes into sliding-scale toll roads where users would pay increased fees for using the lane at peak hours than off-peak hours with each additional X cars increasing the price of use.

Related to highways and roads is our use of cars. Yeah I know, open highways, house in the burbs, white picket fence, 2.3 kids, dog named spot. American dream. That particular American dream might just hold us back in the future. It made sense in the 50s, it seems to make sense in the 00s. As the price of fuel increases and as governments the world round consider attaching a cost to carbon emissions, the use of internal combustion engines will become increasingly expensive. Oh sure we’ll have new technology  that uses less carbon, is cheaper, etc, but I’m still waiting for California’s hydrogen highway to not look like a huge publicity stunt. As the economy recovers, basic materials will go right back to their pre-bust highs much faster than most would like and things like copper for wiring, rubber for tires and insulation, steel for construction, concrete, hell any raw material will go through the roof. The longer the distance between people, the more we’ll have to spend per capita for these things that undergird our infrastructure, and the more it will cost to maintain them. We don’t need to kill cars, just make it such that they are not a necessity in American life.

A logical offshoot of a decreased dependence on cars would be an increased reliance on rail. This runs the gamut from freight rail, to commuter rail, to subways. A really bold plan would fund projects like California’s bullet train from LA to San Francisco or a national bullet system linking major metropolitan areas that could compete with airlines as fuel becomes more expensive. On the freight rail front, we could really use more freight track because demand has outstripped supply for a number of years and the overload contributes to accidents and massive delays. On the commuter rail and subway/lightrail front, the government could fund proposed projects in a number of major metropolitan areas and, if combined with some form of congestion pricing or flexible tolls, could create infrastructure that is more self-sustaining costwise.

Our education system generally is in need of some serious improvements, but even more immediate is the need to change how we conceptualized higher education. People should not be graduating college with more debt than they can reasonably expect to earn in their first year of employment. A possible way to help on this front is to increase federal aid to students and/or create scholarships with strings attached for students who want to pursue a career that might not be as remunerative (or perhaps just gentler loan terms). Also, we should look seriously about how much we need the higher education we have today. I’m not saying all post high school education should go, just that credentialism has gotten a bit ridiculous. Jobs that often require a B.A. really require nothing more than six months of office training in many instances or perhaps a year or two of copy editing and computer skills training, but the low bar to get a decent job just keeps going up as the number of people with B.A.s goes up and the salaries aren’t keeping pace with the debt load kids are graduating with today. B.A.s are great if you’re going into academia or graduate-level work, sciences, etc. But do you really need a B.A. to write? To do any number of boring office jobs that currently require a B.A.? To be an accountant? Hell in Puerto Rio you may need a college degree to be a tour guide earning just above minimum wage. Really? I’m all for a liberal arts education, but when you’re 18 and trying to find a decent job, I’m not sure that spending 4 years racking up debt to get a degree in film is really a step in the right direction.

Next on the agenda is our aging and inefficient power grid. I’m not talking solely about our old power lines and transistors that are blowing out with fun blackouts in the Northeast, but our entire energy infrastructure. Investment in more localized power sources from smartgrid technology which allows small producers (i.e. rooftop solar panels or turbines) to feed power back into the grid would be a good start. Investment in renewable energy sources would also be a boon. Like it or not, most of the world will eventually move towards some form of carbon pricing and it’s better to be prepared while we’re busy tossing around all this money than be caught later.

Our communication network is lacking to say the least. Our broadband access is around #14 and anyone who has ever tried using their cell phone outside of a city, or sometimes even within a city (my mom’s in LA comes to mind) can attest to dropped calls and shoddy service. This is especially true while travelling. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had dropped calls while driving or riding the train. Both of these problems are indirectly related to our low-density settlement patterns because it’s harder to serve sparsely populated areas with just about anything than higher-density areas. That’s not really the point though. The point is that even in modestly dense suburbs there are service issues, gaps, and no service areas.

Whether you agree with the huge stimulus package or not, it’s coming. I’m just here to offer some ideas on how to make sure it gets spent in a way that benefits us for decades rather than short-term.