The Infrastructure Plan

There is one sentence in James Freeman’s recent Wall Street Journal I thought was memorable:

After the $1.9 trillion “Covid relief” plan that was largely unrelated to the treatment of Covid, will Washington now enact a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure plan that is largely unrelated to infrastructure?

I would presume that is a done deal. I would also anticipate a reduced carbon emissions bill that is largely unrelated to reducing carbon emissions.

However, I’m not as disappointed as he is that, at least as it’s presently being presented, the Biden Administration doesn’t intend to expand road capacity with its desired infrastructure spending bill. The relevant quote is this one reported by the Associated Press:

“We start with something unglamorous, which is fixing and improving what we’re already got — there’s been a trillion dollar backlog just in the roads and bridges we already have,” he said. “But I’ll add there are some things that need to be reduced … sometimes roads need to go on a diet.”

He said the U.S. can no longer follow a 1950s mentality of building roads and communities based on moving as many cars as possible, but must adapt to the reality of climate change and ensure the safety of growing numbers of bicyclists and pedestrians on the streets.

“The design choices we make, how fast cars move, whether there’s bike lanes and sidewalks … green space even, all of this is part of that view,” Buttigieg said. “Sometimes we do need to add a road or widen one. Just as often, I think we need to subtract.”

It’s not generally mentioned in discussions of infrastructure but we actually have more unused, obsolete roads and bridges than we do roads and bridges in need of repair. It’s politically difficult to drum up support for dismantling roads and bridges so they just sit there unused, getting tallied in counts of bad infrastructure.

Another thing that’s not generally mentioned in discussions of infrastructure spending bills is that they’re unlikely themselves to produce many jobs. The contracts for such projects tend to go to a small number of politically-connected companies who already have all the employees and equipment they need to do the job.

If I were putting together an infrastructure plan it would be almost entirely devoted to sewer systems and the electrical grid but neither of those would create much in the way of jobs, either, and talk about unglamorous! A few years back I would have added broadband internet connectivity but Elon Musk seems to be taking care of that deficit.