Category Archives: Philosophy of Infrastructure

Fundamental concepts and values

Infrastructure Maintenance and Sustainability

Posted on 2011/03/16 | Leave a comment

Infrastructure needs maintenance; there’s no escaping it.  Storm-water drains get clogged with trash and debris; they must be cleaned out.  Steel bridges must be repainted from time to time to keep corrosion at bay.  If the joints and cracks in pavement are not kept sealed, water seeps into the soils underneath the slab and erodes the road’s load-carrying capacity.  Water purification filters must periodically be cleaned to keep doing their job.  Burned-out lights must be replaced. When a meter breaks, a guardrail is destroyed, or a pipe cracks, it must be fixed, patched, or replaced.  Failure to perform needed maintenance diminishes infrastructure’s performance or reduces its service life or both.

While maintenance is important—indeed crucial—it is often neglected.  Day-to-day maintenance activities have not the scale and scope to attract and hold people’s attention the way new construction does.  Politicians do not get to cut ribbons and shake hands when maintenance is successfully completed.  When budgets are tight or workloads are heavy, it too often seems easy to put off maintenance without immediately serious consequences.  It is often easier for infrastructure managers to find resources for repairs and replacements than for normal maintenance and preservation efforts.  This problem of maintenance is ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable.

We should know better. We have those old sayings: “A stitch in time saves nine.”  “For want of a nail” to shoe the king’s horse, the war and kingdom are lost. Deferring and neglecting maintenance increase the rate of wear and tear on infrastructures, increase the chances of an early breakdown.  The costs of premature repairs and replacements exceed what it would have cost to do the maintenance.  Infrastructure professionals speak of the “life cycle cost” of infrastructure, the total of all spending required to build and operate facilities to provide the services we want for an expected number of years; neglecting maintenance almost inevitably is more costly.  “Pay me now or pay me later.”

Knowing that our tendency is toward neglect, we try to design and construct facilities that need as little maintenance as possible.  It may be argued that this strategy increases life-cycle costs, for example when labor is abundant or capital is scarce, but human nature makes it a wise one.  This then is the first step toward sustainable infrastructure: it should not require much care.

While maintenance requirements may be minimized, it is unlikely they can be altogether eliminated for most infrastructures.  The second step toward sustainability is to ensure that required maintenance is carried out.  This is a matter of social and institutional relationships.  Roman roads and aqueducts were kept up through military supervision under strong central government control. A monastic clergy served the function very well for the Roman Catholic Church’s network of European cathedrals and shrines during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Balinese water temples have successfully maintained the structures and operating rules safeguarding rice production on the Indonesian island.  The demands many universities make of major donors, that anyone wishing to support construction of a new building must also be willing to donate funds to endow maintenance of that building and its grounds is a modern adaptation of such practices.

But even with proper maintenance, infrastructures age and components wear with usage.  Earthquakes, storms, and evolving patterns of use, while possibly anticipated in general, may cause unpredictable specific damage at unpredicted times.  The third step toward truly sustainable infrastructure then is this: it must be possible to fix it quickly and with relative ease when it fails.  The designers of San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit, for example, recognizing the risk that seismic activity might shift the soil and rock through which tunnels were built, arranged for excavation of larger chambers where a tunnel crossed a fault line, to allow tacks to be quickly realigned following an earthquake. 

In short, sustainable civilization requires the support of sustainable infrastructure. Sustainable infrastructure (1) needs little care, (2) is well cared for, and (3) is fixable.

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Talking better infrastructure

Posted on 2011/03/08 | Leave a comment

Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell recently opined that “The proponents of infrastructure investment have yet to close the sale with the American people…” (The Infrastructurist Forum, Feb. 15, 2011) that the nation’s infrastructure needs “repair and revitalization.” 

It hasn’t been for lack of trying.  Every newsworthy disaster stirs up swarms of dire warnings: the 2010 gas pipeline explosion that leveled a neighborhood in San Bruno, California; the rush-hour collapse in 2007 of an Interstate highway bridge in Minneapolis; or the 2009 crash of two trains on Washington, DC’s, Metro subway.  Following the example set two decades ago by the National Council on Public Works Improvement, the American Society of Civil Engineers periodically issues its Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, giving it a solid “D” in 2010.

The trouble is, things don’t look so bad to the average person on the street.  Most of us get up in the morning, turn on the lights, brush our teeth, travel to work on paved roads, and are unsurprised when the garbage in our wastebaskets disappears without a trace.   Most of us only read about disasters or watch the video, even when the areas affected reach such grand scales as the destruction of New Orleans and the electrical blackout of the continent’s northeast.  Talk about necessary maintenance and fixing problems and most of us simply tune out.

In the summer and fall of 2010, Maslansky Luntz and Partners (a communications strategy firm) conducted a series of “listening sessions” around the country to learn about why the voters in some states and localities have been willing to increase their taxes to pay for their road systems while so many of our elected officials adamantly resist even mentioning the idea.  The work was done at the request of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, under the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.

What the listeners found was that people expect their taxes to pay for maintenance; it’s a given.  If those who are responsible for the roads and bridges say that maintenance is being neglected, then they simply haven’t been doing their job, even if the reason is there’s not enough funding.

Modernizing, however, improving technology, making things work better…. That’s another story!  Fixing the traffic lights so that you never have to sit at a red light when there’s no traffic on the cross street…. That’s worth paying for!  Clearing traffic crashes and mishaps quickly to get the traffic moving again; synching bus and train schedules to ensure that a trip by transit goes smoothly, and making sure that there’s a backup bus for when the train does run late; providing better mobility generally, that’s what people want and will pay to get.

Extending the message to all infrastructure (and to appropriate a phrase), “It’s the service, stupid!”  Infrastructure is a matter of steel and cement only to those who design and build the bridges, dams, and pipes that carry our vehicles, drive our water and electric power systems, and bring fuel to our homes.  The essence of infrastructure for most of us is the services provided: If we want to close the sale, we have to offer more and better service, not simply a legacy system in a state of good repair.

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How Much Infrastructure Spending Is “Enough?”

Posted on 2011/02/26 | Leave a comment

Concern for the state of our public works infrastructure seems to have percolated to the forefront of current political discourse.  The web-based news and commentary site The Infrastructurist, for example, recently presented their “First Annual Infrastructurist Forum” on the future of U.S. infrastructure, attracting statements from such luminaries as Representatives John Mica (R-Fl) and Nick Rahall (D-WV), Chairman and Ranking Democratic Member, respectively, of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee; real-estate development expert turned pundit Chris Leinberger of The Brookings Institution; and Forbes magazine columnist Joel Kotkin.  Reports on both the national political scene and local issues in The New York Times, TheWashington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other print media outlets feature the term almost daily.  There has not been so much attention to the topic since the months following the 1981 publication of America in Ruins: Beyond the Public Works Pork Barrel, by Pat Choate and Susan Walter.

Choate and Walter warned that government spending on infrastructure had failed to keep pace with the nation’s needs, causing our public facilities to wear out faster than they were being replaced.  The book sparked national debate about not only how much we should be investing in infrastructure, but also whether such public investment is worth making.

Suggesting that we were not then spending enough, Bill Clinton’s 1991 presidential campaign included a promise to “rebuild America,” but an $80 billion program proposed early in his first term never made it through the Congress. A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report shows that total annual public spending for transportation and water infrastructure was higher in 2007 than in 1991, when viewed as a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) the amount has declined steadily for four decades. (Public Spending on Transportation and Water Infrastructure, November 2010)  Whether or not America was “in ruins” in 1981, the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2010 issued a Report Card for America’s Infrastructure with an overall GPA of “D.”

On the question of whether public investment in infrastructure is worthwhile, economists have bickered about the measureable rate of return on investment.  Such academic heavyweights as David Aschauer, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Alicia Munnell featured prominently in the late 1980s and 1990s.  A truce was called (or perhaps interest in an unwinnable dispute simply flagged) with widespread agreement that the rate of return, observed at the level of the nation or large regions, had been at least positive in recent decades.  Researchers continue to document examples of quite reasonable returns. (For example, nearly 16% on transportation investment; Alfredo M. Pereira and Jorge M. Andraz, 2005, “Public Investment in Transportation Infrastructure and Economic Performance in Portugal,” Review of Development Economics 9:2 (177-196))

So an argument can be made that public investment does yield net returns.  But how much investment is needed to maintain productivity and growth?  Walter Rostow’s seminal book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto appeared in 1960, asserting that economies launching into modern industrial growth show investment rates rising from about 5% of the national income to 10% or more. The CBO study shows U. S. investment in transportation and water infrastructure has been below 2.5% for some years; allowing for spending on other infrastructure (such as waste treatment facilities or schools, for example) would certainly increase this percentage, quite possibly to a level within Rostow’s range. 

Economist A. O. Hirschman, at about the same time that Rostow’s work was being completed, argued that temporary shortages of infrastructure can be tolerated, that facilities can be built later to catch up with demand derived from private industry’s growth.  (The Strategy of Economic Development, 1958)  He went on to suggest that what retards economic advance in most cases is a shortage of management capability rather than physical facilities.  More recent analyses have provided supporting evidence. (Charles R. Hulten, “Infrastructure Effectiveness as a Determinant of Economic Growth:  How Well You Use it May Be More Important than How Much You Have,” 1996 and 2005)

What has been neglected in all of the analyses that I have seen is an explicit consideration of maintenance spending, as distinct from investment.  Infrastructure, like most engineered systems, requires periodic care to keep it functioning properly.  Leaves, trash and other debris clog drains that channel rainwater away from roadways must be cleaned out.  Filters that remove silt and bacteria from drinking water must be flushed.  The costs of such maintenance effort typically are accrued in different accounts from those the represent “investment.”  But if maintenance is neglected, the quality of services and longevity of facilities will be impaired.  My discussions with people who manage maintenance in public works agencies suggest that maintenance budgets are often squeezed, forcing neglect.

In the absence of data and solid analysis for estimating appropriate levels of spending, I have found that many facilities managers use as a rule of thumb that about 2% of the current replacement value of the facility should be spent annually on routine maintenance.  (For example, see Committing to the Cost of Ownership: Maintenance and Repair of Public Buildings, 1990, The National Academies Press, the report of a study I worked on with a number of government facilities managers.)  Spending less (assuming the money is used effectively) risks premature deterioration and failures.  Failure of the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis in August 2007 and rupture of a 66-inch water main in suburban Washington, DC, in December 2008 are two of many examples of such risks becoming reality. 

The point is, we really do not know how much we need to spend for our infrastructure.  But the evidence suggests we need to spend more than we do now.

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Posted in Philosophy of Infrastructure, Society and Networks

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Reflection on Doing More With Less

Posted on 2011/02/17 | Leave a comment

Political discourse has no shortage of empty or misleading catchphrases.  A particularly popular one is that we must “do more with less.”

It has bipartisan support.  New York’s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, speaking as a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, was quoted, “We’re going to have to change our orientation in this state, and how can we do more with less. You know, every family, every business, has had to do more with less.” (Newsday; October 30, 2010) Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal (Business Exchange; December 06, 2010) in an interview on Political Capital With Al Hunt said “We have cut higher education by about 4.5 percent. We’re all going to have to do more with less.” 

It’s not only the politicians who say it, of course.  As the recession deepened in 2008 and 2009 and budgets came under pressure, employee’s across the private sector were told what National Public Radio’s Chana Joffe-Walt termed “four familiar words: Do more with less.” (Morning Edition; February 26, 2009)

It sounds good, conjuring up thoughts of waste reduced and fat trimmed.  But anyone who is old enough to remember when airlines provided legroom even in coach class knows that what is doing more for some can mean getting less for others. 

In an article in Forbes magazine, innovation specialist Scott Anthony had a sensible perspective. When you are told to cut your costs, you cannot really do more.  Instead, you focus on doing only what is absolutely necessary to sell your product and figure out what the customer is willing to sacrifice. (“Creative Disruption: Doing More with Less” February 26, 2009)

Anthony writes that there are three basic categories of performance objectives; (1) functional objectives relating to product performance and reliability, like provide a smooth ride or deliver safe-to-drink water on demand; (2) emotional objectives associated with the influence a product has on how customer feel about themselves, for example choosing “the best that money can buy” or opting for frugality; and (3) social objectives associated with how customers perceive others feel about them, seeking for instance to demonstrate solidarity with a group or to impress people.

When it comes to infrastructure, many people lose sight of emotional and social objectives, and they generally view even functional objectives very narrowly.  

Take our public water supply, for example. We take for granted that abundant, safe water is available at the turn of the tap.  Occasional lapses occur: a broken water main can flood a street, force residents of an area to boil their drinking water and, in the aftermath, make faucets run muddy for a time.  Bacterial contamination of two purification plants serving the Milwaukee area sickened thousands and drew international attention in April, 1993.  For the most part though, water is reliably and inexpensively available on demand and it meets quality standards set to ensure public health. (Despite improvements made in recent years, this is still not the case for a notable fraction of the world’s population.  The United Nations World Health Organization estimates 13% of world population lacks any safe drinking water source, piped or otherwise.)

Nevertheless, sales of bottled drinking water in the United States total about $11 billion annually and continue to grow.  People buy it because they think it is safer or tastes better than what comes from the tap.  They buy it because the like the look of the bottle or the idea that it is imported.  They buy it because they identify with the celebrities paid to endorse a brand.  According to water expert Peter H. Gleick we consume 30 gallons per person annually. (Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water 2010)  The marketers have figured out how to give consumers more than the bare-bones minimum of public infrastructure service.

Roman engineer and architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio wrote that a city’s infrastructure—for him,  public buildings, defensive walls and towers, and shrines and temples—should all be built with strength, utility, grace.  (De architectura, Book 1, first century BCE)  Pressed time and again to “do more with less,” we have lost much of the grace or beauty in infrastructure and, I fear, some of the utility and strength.

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People, Nature, and Green Infrastructure

Posted on 2011/02/16 | Leave a comment

I shall list explicitly in a future post all of the elements of what I call “infrastructure.”  For now I want to consider one of the outliers: wilderness.

Most readers will grant, I imagine, that infrastructure includes government-provided roads, water supply, and sewers.  Some may argue that I should not include energy supply and telecommunications, because these systems are typically managed by the private sector; but I shall include them.  Monuments and parks—Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, for example—also qualify easily, as I shall write, because they structure our views of the world, our understanding of where we are, and even how we think of ourselves. 

Wilderness is more difficult. 

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote in Walking, penned in 1861 but published after his death, “…in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”  I take his meaning quite literally: We must have places in the world where humanity’s touch remains light if we are to survive as a species and continue to reside in this world.  It is a perspective that photographers Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter conveyed viscerally in influential coffee-table portfolios published by the Sierra Club. (Ansel Adams and Nancy Newell, This is the American Earth, 1960; Elliot Porter, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, 1962)  It is an argument forcefully made by Harvard naturalist Edward O. Wilson (The Future of Life, 2002) Adam’s images in particular—in the Yosemite Valley and the Tetons are among the most memorable for me—arguably spurred the rise of environmental consciousness in the United States as Sierra Club calendars graced college dorm rooms across the nation.

Set aside—for now, at least—consideration of whether “wildness” and “wilderness” are interchangeable ideas; Henry David seems to use them as such.  The evidence suggests, however, that the sort of place he had in mind could be experienced without making a trek to Yosemite.  He never traveled farther from home than Lake Ontario, and the Maine woods were probably the closest he ever came to wildness.  Granted, the woods in the mid-19th Century were less the habitat of loggers and snowmobilers than they are today, but New England had already seen 200 years of European settlement and native Americans had cleared an farmed throughout region for much longer.  As historian William Cronon convincingly explains, the landscape of nature that Thoreau would have known was far from free of human influence. (Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, 1983)  During his famous two years on the shores of Walden Pond, Thoreau was never beyond the reach of the train’s whistle.

Thoreau’s interest was primarily intellectual.  He wrote that we need the idea wildness to nurture our spirit, that “forest and wilderness” are the source of “the tonics and barks which brace mankind.” (Walking, Part 2)  The perspective separates humanity from the rest of “nature,” as though we are not a part of it.  A rich literature explores the origins and evolution of that view, but I will not go there now.

Suffice it to say that humanity and the other elements of our world are inseparable, and science is now giving us a functional understanding of the essential services we get from natural systems.  Ecology’s initial stirrings among such Thoreau contemporaries as Humboldt, Darwin, and Wallace is now branching into such sub-disciplines as landscape ecology and systems ecology—even urban ecology—and yielding the knowledge to devise management tools.

For lack of a better term, many people refer to this type of infrastructure as “green.”  (See, for example, the admirable book by Mark A. Benedict and Edward T. McMahon, Green Infrastructure: Linking Landscapes and Communities, 2006)  For me, there is no distinction to be made based on color or the underlying science used to develop and manage the essential hardware and software providing underlying structure and essential support for our economy and society.

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What do you mean, “infrastructure?”

Posted on 2011/02/12 | Leave a comment

Looking at any city’s downtown skyline, one can easily forget that the tall buildings with their bright metal-and-glass surfaces rest on deep foundations.  Thousands of people gather together in these buildings each day, their labor justifying the buildings’ construction.  Roads, bridges, sewers, dams, and the like make it possible for these people to congregate and sustain themselves while they work and play; these various works themselves are the product of thousands of people.  Buried deeper still are the history and culture that give the city an essential character and make its skyline symbolic for those who know something of it.

 Infrastructure is a relatively new word. Historian Josef Konvitz conjectures that the the term probably appeared in print first in France about 1875.  (The Urban Millennium: The City‑Building Process from the Early Middle Ages to the Present, 1985, Southern Illinois University Press) The Oxford English Dictionary cites the same date. (2nd edition, 1989)  This venerable source goes on to attribute the first appearance in English in 1927, in Chambers’s Journal, a popular 19th-century literature, science, and arts weekly.  Winston Churchill reportedly referred dismissively in a 1950 speech in the British House of Commons to “the usual jargon about the infrastructure of supra‑national authority.”

 A search in my local library (remember those book stacks?) suggests that Americans were slow to pick up the term.  The earliest Webster’s entry I found is the Third New International Dictionary (unabridged, 1981), and that lacked any etymology.  The definition was an “underlying foundation or basic framework (as of an organization or a system),” referring especially to installations required for military purposes. 

 The word is everywhere today, and has been adopted particularly by the information and telecommunications industries.  A Google search for “infrastructure” on the Web—in February, 2011— turns up 119 million results. To compare: “cities” yields 398 million, “taxes” 174 million, and “Webster’s dictionary” only about 8.3 million.

 “Infrastructure” and “cities” together produces only 43.7 million hits.  This smaller subset is closer to representing my interests here.  Using the word infrastructure in the context of cities and larger regions really began in the mid-1980s.    Publication of America in Ruins: Beyond the Public Works Pork Barrel (1981, by Pat Choate and Susan Walter) kicked off a decade of national debate about the economic and political importance infrastructure, but the word itself was not much used in the book.  Congressionally funded studies yielded Public Works Infrastructure: Policy Considerations for the 1980s.in 1983, Hard Choices in 1985, and both New Directions for the Nation’s Public Works and Fragile Foundations in 1988. 

 Whatever else they may have accomplished, these studies did succeed at least in raising public awareness of the word.  Fragile Foundations in particular introduced the idea of a “report card” rating America’s infrastructure performance, awarding grades as low as “D-” for our water supply, mass transit, hazardous-waste management, and other systems.  It was a masterful metaphor that sharply boosted the frequency of infrastructure’s appearances in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.

 Yet the word’s meaning was not at all clear.  Some people thought only roads and highways, others were all-inclusive.  Was it only public works or private-sector as well?  I worked as a consultant with a National Research Council study that approached “public works infrastructure” in rather broad terms and introducing a concept new to the debate, that infrastructure is not simply hardware.  In a footnote to the study report that I drafted, we asserted that infrastructure “…includes both specific functional modes—highways, streets, roads, and bridges; mass transit; airports and airways; water supply and water resources; wastewater management; solid-waste treatment and disposal; electric power generation and transmission; telecommunications; and hazardous waste management–and the combined system these modal elements comprise.  A comprehension of infrastructure spans not only these public works facilities, but also the operating procedures, management practices, and development policies that interact together with societal demand and the physical world to facilitate the transport of people and goods, provision of water for drinking and a variety of other uses, safe disposal of society’s waste products, provision of energy where it is needed, and transmission of information within and between communities.” (Infrastructure for the 21st Century: Framework for a Research Agenda, 1987)

In other words, the infrastructure that interests me provides services to society.  The concept includes software as well as hardware.   It cannot be understood except in the context of the communities it serves.  That is my scope.  That is where I am coming from.

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