
The Road Taken – History and Future of U.S. Infrastructure - Osiris30
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/books/review/the-road-taken-by-henry-petroski.html?pagewanted=all
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teddyh
In the U.S., apparently “infrastructure” means “roads”. Hardly a mention of
trains, _no_ mentions of optical fibers, electric grids, etc.

~~~
Grishnakh
There's a reason for that. Here in the US, we don't consider train tracks to
be "infrastructure" because they're almost all privately owned. Amtrak has to
lease track usage from heavy freight railroads, and their trains have to sit
and wait any time a freight train wants the track: freight has priority over
passengers in this country.

Optical fibers are not infrastructure here, because that's all privately owned
too (even if the land to put it on was gifted to the corporations who own the
fiber).

Electric grids are privately owned too, but their owners are regulated as
utility monopolies.

So basically, only roads and bridges are actually publicly-owned.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
Why would infrastructure have to be "public"? Trains and mail is partially
privatized, fiber/copper entirely and still those are considered
infrastructure.

~~~
Grishnakh
Yes, but the whole idea behind the worry that US infrastructure is falling
apart is that the government has a role to fix it.

Obviously, with roads and bridges, it's the government's job to fix those,
since those things are owned and operated by the government.

However, do you think that the government should be handing buckets of cash to
Comcast so they can maintain their cable internet infrastructure?

Should the government fork over money to Verizon, AT&T, etc. to maintain
cellular infrastructure?

Should the government hand money to CSX to maintain their railroads? (Over and
above the money that Amtrak pays them to lease the track, that is.)

As for the mail, that's not privatized: the USPS is wholly-owned by the US
federal government. But as I understand it, it's entirely self-funded. Unless
you're talking about UPS/FedEx.

If the infrastructure is privately owned, why should the government use
taxpayer money to maintain and upgrade it? That's the epitome of Mussolini-
style fascism: the government working solely for the corporations and not the
people. If the infrastructure is really that important, and the corporate
owners aren't taking care of it, then it should just be nationalized.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> However, do you think that the government should be handing buckets of cash
> to Comcast so they can maintain their cable internet infrastructure? […]

I don't have an opinion on that topic, but traditionally governments take over
private infrastructure companies if that is necessary to continue the service.
TFL in London is a government body but when the subway system was initially
developed they were entirely private companies.

~~~
Grishnakh
That's how it was in Manhattan (NYC) too, and that's why the layout of the
subways doesn't seem to make much sense: they were all started by competing
companies 100 years or more ago.

The problem isn't "taking over private infrastructure to continue the
service", the problem is when the government funnels money to private
corporations to continue the service. If the corporation can provide the
service all by itself using free-market economics (more of less, there's
probably some utility regulation needed), then fine, but if they have to be
propped up by the government, then they shouldn't exist and it should be
nationalized. A prime example of this is the government gifting tons of money
to internet providers like Comcrap to make infrastructure improvements, who
then just pocketed the money and didn't make any improvements.

IMO, all critical infrastructure should just be government-owned, and operated
much like the USPS but with less Congressional interference. The USPS operates
basically as a private company, except it's owned by the government and isn't
for-profit, and is overseen by the government. Overall, it's worked pretty
well except for Congress screwing around with it from time to time (like
requiring them to pre-fund all employees' retirement with a law in 2006). The
MTA (the company that runs public transit) in NYC works this way too. Putting
the safety and security of your nation into the hands of a privately-held
corporation that's only interested in profits is sheer lunacy.

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massysett
"Guardrails should be designed with their ends buried in the ground so that
vehicles can’t crash into them, for example"

Maybe I'll read this because I shall like to see his reasoning. Many
guardrails used to be like this. My recollection is that when guardrail ends
are buried, vehicles can easily run over the end so the middle of the car
rides up over the guardrail. This can flip the car over--either onto the road
or onto whatever the guardrail was supposed to be guarding.

So my understanding was that the reason guardrail ends are now simply exposed
and capped off is because it's better to collide head on with a guardrail than
it is to ride over a guardrail and flip over.

[edit] this is further discussed at this link. Maybe the book discusses this
better than the review did.

[http://www.crashforensics.com/papers.cfm?PaperID=53](http://www.crashforensics.com/papers.cfm?PaperID=53)

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> Maybe I'll read this because I shall like to see his reasoning. Many
> guardrails used to be like this. My recollection is that when guardrail ends
> are buried, vehicles can easily run over the end so the middle of the car
> rides up over the guardrail. This can flip the car over--either onto the
> road or onto whatever the guardrail was supposed to be guarding.

Yeah, I remember this coming up in discussions in Austria as well. The current
design of guardrails involves moving the guardrail terminal out of harms way:
[http://www.land-der-erfinder.at/wp-
content/uploads/Leitschie...](http://www.land-der-erfinder.at/wp-
content/uploads/Leitschiene.png)

And for retrofitting guard rails between lanes where there is not enough
space, they installed shock absorbers: [http://www.land-der-erfinder.at/wp-
content/uploads/Aufpralld...](http://www.land-der-erfinder.at/wp-
content/uploads/Aufpralld%C3%A4mpfer.png)

If you crash into those it crumples.

~~~
DrScump
<they installed shock absorbers>

In the SF Bay Area, such junctions of guardrails tend to be preceded by what
look like huge plastic garbage pails filled with sand, apparently to absorb as
much energy as possible without (or, at least, before) bouncing such vehicles
back into traffic.

The other extreme was a freeway case (locals to the San Jose area can see this
now, on 85 northbound in Cupertino between the onramp from 280 westbound and
the Fremont Ave. exit) where the guardrail began about 10 feet from the side
soundwall, leaving a car-width's gap to the right of the guardrail. A
perpendicular soundwall was about 30 feet beyond.

One evening, a car went right through the gap and into the perpendicular wall
at full speed.

Subsequently, the guardrail was extended at an angle to meet the side
soundwall.

~~~
toast0
280 is a north/south freeway, despite the north side going due west in the
area you describe.

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Ben-G
In this somewhat related article the controller of SF discusses how the city's
budget is used: [http://www.sfexaminer.com/san-franciscos-9-billion-
question/](http://www.sfexaminer.com/san-franciscos-9-billion-question/)

It's fairly obvious that there isn't enough $ for infrastructure investment on
a municipal level.

I'm not entirely sure how the system in the U.S. works but it appears that a
city is responsible for the maintenance of its own roads. For transit cities
like SF this is somewhat unfortunate. The 7 million people living in the Bay
Area use these streets frequently but a majority does not contribute to
funding them.

Probably city tolls (for regular streets, not only bridges) could help
mitigate this issue.

~~~
paulddraper
> a majority does not contribute to funding them

There are all sorts of taxes: property taxes, toll roads, sales taxes, etc.
The 7 million will pay these taxes in one way or another.

~~~
stretchwithme
Paying directly for something is better than paying indirectly. Because you
consider the cost of a resource before you use it.

If we all paid a hotel tax instead of paying for hotel rooms, a lot more
people would be staying in hotels and there would be no way to allocate scarce
resources when demand is high, other than first come, first served.

That would mean chronic hotel shortages and ever-increasing amounts of public
money being spent to build new capacity so that nobody goes without when
demand is high.

And that's exactly what many people face at rush hour: a shortage of available
road. Except we've been conditioned to think this is somehow normal and
unsolvable, when its actually artificial.

In Singapore, they have demand pricing and a lot less congestion at rush hour.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> Paying directly for something is better than paying indirectly. Because you
> consider the cost of a resource before you use it.

That does not work because it disadvantages the areas which are
underdeveloped.

> In Singapore, they have demand pricing and a lot less congestion at rush
> hour.

But Singapore is tiny and quote homogenous.

If there were no legal requirements for USPS for instance to operate all over
the country then Alaska would not have a mail service at all. There are areas
too sparsely populated / too poor to afford infrastructure and (federal) taxes
are necessary to finance it.

~~~
rayiner
> If there were no legal requirements for USPS for instance to operate all
> over the country then Alaska would not have a mail service at all. There are
> areas too sparsely populated / too poor to afford infrastructure and
> (federal) taxes are necessary to finance it.

Isn't that just the market saying it's too inefficient for anyone to live in
Alaska?

------
hanniabu
What the government really needs to do is adopt newer software that will allow
for better tracking of what needs repairs, what has been repaired, when
something was last inspected, what needs inspection, and repair reporting
tools. They should also adopt software that would allow them to better
schedule all these repairs efficiently and in a timely matter. All this
software should have contractor bidding platform integrated into it and also
be integrated with scheduled utility repairs.

This software can be used to anticipate budgets since you would know what
upcoming repairs and inspections are needed. It would also prevent the
situation where a city finally paves a nice new road after 15 years of
potholes and then 2 weeks after completion the gas companies come in and tear
up the road to do their work and do a shitty job patching the road back up so
you're left with potholes again within a year, all thanks to poor
communication.

I know a few cities have adopted apps that allow residents to report needed
repairs and they've been working great, both with upkeep and cost savings.
That should really be proof of concept enough to make the needed changes, but
I suspect there will be a long pause to the politicians can give their friends
enough time to make a similar knockoff product and grant them an over-priced
contact.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> What the government really needs to do is adopt newer software that will
> allow for better tracking of what needs repairs, what has been repaired,
> when something was last inspected, what needs inspection, and repair
> reporting tools.

May I ask what the point of that would be? It's not like figuring out what's
broken is a hard task. This sounds like it would drive up infrastructure cost
even more than it already is.

~~~
losteric
That's like saying the software world don't need issue trackers/scrum
boards/todo lists because it's easy for devs to figure out bugs...

City projects operate at scales beyond most companies... Coordination is kinda
important for a decentralized organization running multiple billion dollar
projects that impact thousands upon thousands of shareholders and consumers.

~~~
ams6110
Managing these kinds of projects doesn't need sophisticated software (not that
software is a bad thing, in itself). It needs competent managers. Most city
managers are political appointments, selected to meet some arbitrary diversity
quotas, etc. and are not the most competent person available (often far from
it).

~~~
losteric
It's a little of A and a little of B... We need competent people to manage the
system, but we also need systems that give greater transparency into the state
of the city.

As the parent poster pointed out, it's pretty common for low-level managers
not to know about overlapping work in other departments... or for higher level
managers to get data that's been sanitized by several levels of management.
Even better would be giving citizens access to at least some of the data,
making sure the right decisions are being made.

------
Grishnakh
There's been some movies about the future of US infrastructure. They usually
have the name "Mad Max" in them.

