Big time! The USA could use a lot more maintainers. People who want to see beautiful, well built, and carefully taken care of cities and streets. People who make sure the power is humming and pipes are clean. Unfortunately the political situation is more of a "Keep building shitty car dependent walled garden suburbs that no one can afford, except investors. Keep that up until the house of cards collapses under the weight of our poorly maintained and expensive infrastructure."
No, we've done a very poor job of even keeping up with maintenance in this country. Plus we've push the boundaries of building where we shouldn't. It won't end well for a lot of people.
Infrastructure maintenance was quite a big issue during the 2015 US election. I'm not sure the Trump administration actually did anything about it – I don't really follow US politics that closely. My point is: people do care.
I think the bigger problem is maintenance is just one cost out of many. There's also education, and health care, and social services, and police, and firemen, and pensions, and all sorts of other things, and that's also important. It's relatively easy to "save" on maintenance because nothing is going to fall down immediately and no one will really notice – at least not for a while. In the long run you're not really saving anything of course.
It's easy to critique this from the sidelines, but the pressures politicians and governments are under make it pretty tricky to do anything else. Saving money in other areas is going to be unpopular. Raising taxes even more so. A lot of times stuff like this is a Kobayashi Maru.
The US is terrible about infrastructure maintenance. I think it's a combination of two things: Firstly nobody gets their picture taken cutting a ribbon for a maintenance project, and secondly if infrastructure is crappy then nobody wants to pay more taxes because obviously the government doesn't know how to take care of things. It's a double whammy of failure.
I’m not sure what your point is. It’s not viable to build more roads, so tunnels it must be. Tunnels are expensive, so rail is a requirement. Maintenance is must, regardless of political will.
Saying that US institutions can’t/won’t maintain things, thus don’t build things that need maintenance is just unhelpful. You might as well say we should all give up now and go home.
Yeah but infrastructure is already up. A lot of the work required for upkeep doesn't require as many people as is required to build it out in the first place.
Well, I agree with the problem, but not the cause. Infrastructure maintenance and failure to plan for it are endemic in America. The only time it seems that ongoing maintenance is planned and funded from the beginning of a project is toll roads, where private-public entities can extract profit from the road.
My stronger point though, is funding. It isn't the fault of state utility operators that we don't have the capacity. It is the fault of local and state governments who have not reacted quickly enough to growth requirements.
Reminds me of the perennial reports from the American Society of Civil Engineers talking about how the US's infrastructure is degraded and everyone had better hire a lot of civil engineers to fix it.
First it's bridges, then it's roading, electric lines, gas lines, water lines, sewerage, civic buildings needing maintenance (schools, hospitals, community centers).
There are endless projects that need money to maintain and the current system of sprawl spreads that money too thinly.
Also cost of maintenance. In much of the US they can barely keep the paint lines clear and the pavement un-potholed, and now we want to put electric infrastructure into the mix?
The USA has been a suburban nation for quite a while now, and previous generations paid to lay down the roads and pipes. The interesting question is why poorer people with relatively crude technology were able to create this infrastructure, but we can no longer afford to maintain it. Infrastructure budgets have increased (in per-capita and inflation-adjusted terms), but our maintenance capacity has decreased; the question is why?
Yea or just ya know hire civil engineers to do basic maintenance on us infrastructure. Plenty of work to go around, there's no need to make up stuff to do.
The infrastructure in this country is in an absolutely dilapidated state. Roads are potholed, bridges are collapsing, water and sewage pipes date back to the Civil War, Internet connectivity is expensive and slow. There's more than enough work to keep a whole lot of people busy for a generation, if we're willing to pay for it.
Indeed, the US could use thousands of workers to fix our roads and bridges. Or to build renewable energy infrastructure. Problem is getting any of that funded, especially in today's political climate.
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