Sustainable Infrastructure Investment

Toward a More Equitable Future

Eric Christian Bruun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000564044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book provides examples and suggestions for readers to understand how public investment decisions for sustainable infrastructure are made. Through detailed analysis of public investment in infrastructure over the last few decades in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Finland, the author explores how the decision-making processes for major public works spending, many of them requiring quite rigorous and detailed computational methodologies, can result in plans that underserve large portions of the population, are inequitable, and fail to efficiently preserve public property. Beginning with some of the commonly offered explanations for the slow pace of investment and repair in a supposedly prosperous society facing serious environmental challenges, the book then explores media's role in shaping the public-at-large's understanding of the situation and the unimaginative solutions put forward by politicians. It continues with some case studies of infrastructure investment, or lack thereof, including an exploration of competing uses for government funds. It concludes with some suggestions. It is aimed at a large readership of professionals, students, and policy makers in political science, urban planning, and civil engineering.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to several people with very different knowledge bases than my own. Professor Garry Potter read the manuscript carefully from the perspective of a social theorist and was invaluable to me in making sure that I was not speaking in jargon but in a clear and logical manner. My sister Rita Bruun used her background in the history of political ideology and US constitutional law to make sure my thinking was clear and my level of detail was sufficient. Otso Kivekäs Is member of the Green Party of Finland and took the time to provide me with details about investment policy I could not access myself with my limited skills in reading Finnish. Thanks also to my friends who made field trips or rummaged through archives to obtain photos for me. Their names are given in the photo credits. I also must say that I found my inspiration to write this book from the many comments I received from the anonymous reviewers of my research proposals on the topic of multidisciplinary infrastructure analysis and planning.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003245704-1

“....the construction of a new city is not the answer to these problems. Nor can it be a substitute for better urban planning. Instead of new cities/urban settlements, we need to invest heavily in improving the deteriorating infrastructure — water supply, drainage, education, health, environment etc — in the existing ones. Also, the government needs to bring these public services to smaller towns in order to control unchecked growth in labour migration from less developed areas to major urban centres for jobs and better services.”

This book was written at the tail end of the Trump Administration and the beginning of the Biden Administration. The hot topics of the proposed Green New Deal plus racial and economic justice are very much intertwined with what choices the US government makes with regard to its public investment strategy. From my perch as a person who has lived mostly in the USA but also outside of it in a couple of other prosperous countries, when combined with my systems analysis background, gives me a unique view of infrastructure and the public services it supports. What investments are languishing, what are the economic-related justifications and excuses, and what role has the historical evolution of the USA, in particular, played? It is a complex story that this book tries to summarize with the assistance of some selected case studies. If there seems to be a bias by picking some of them to illicit outrage, then I am guilty as charged. In my defense, I also try to offer productive suggestions.

Given the reality of Brexit, the UK is already looking toward the USA for ideas and business relationships regarding public services. For this reason, as well as the Lockean philosophical ties that still bind the English-speaking countries, I have also paid special attention to comparisons that might be of interest to readers in the UK. More than any other prosperous country, the UK has followed the USA in privatization of what are elsewhere understood to be public services – from education to transportation. Transportation was the first to be lopped off and I focus most heavily on that. For many years after it deregulated transit in the 1980s during the Thatcher revolution, the UK Central Government would simply refuse to help any city build rail transit, arguing that it would be unfair competition to unsubsidized buses. Whether or not a city democratically decided it wanted a publicly planned, integrated transit system based on a hierarchy of modes, like its peers over on The Continent, was immaterial.

I have been working in topics related to urban transportation for over 30 years. Now, I am increasingly bothered by hearing the same old debates in the USA that go on without resolution, not just about transportation but all infrastructure. Not that we do not hear about it, as messengers like the American Society of Civil Engineers point out the need to do something every year (ASCE 2020, 2021). The problems these debates address are the same and even intensifying. I feel especially qualified to weigh in on this debate as my areas of special expertise, transit system analysis and urban form changes and supply chain changes to support sustainable development, sit at the intersection of engineering and the social sciences. Furthermore, I have made several unsuccessful attempts to find funding for the study of the interactions between various types of infrastructure, making the argument that decisions about land use and the transportation choices that support it link the cost and efficiency of all urban infrastructure.

It is not as though these unresolved problems have taken us by surprise. The inability for those without their own cars to get to work is nothing new. Heavy traffic and saturated traffic at signals had been forecast years ago. The ability of municipalities to finance maintenance of their sewers, wastewater treatment plants, their school and library buildings, their public housing, their roads, and their parks has been an ongoing struggle. So much so that visions of improvements are no longer even offered by our leaders or pondered by the citizens. I came to this last realization after living in Helsinki the last ten years where the city continually reveals new proposals and improves already very good transit systems and biking facilities, and where roads are closed temporarily to install central heating pipes that reduce the fuel burn at the power stations.

Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi are extreme cases where even safe drinking water is no longer taken for granted. And there are periodic stories of dams that fail, water mains that burst, and sinkholes that open. That used to be a large part of what I knew about the state of infrastructure outside my own silos. But I had come to recognize that many of the issues were analogous across public works and widened out my interests. I found that concerned citizens and officials involved in their various silos were often being played off against each other. Here is an example: if City Council wants to fill the potholes and repave some streets that means the water treatment plant replacement will have to be deferred. They both would have to come out of the same budget, typically with little or no help at all to be expected from the state government. But perhaps some matching funds can be expected from the Feds if one is willing to wait in a long line. So, if the public is even consulted at all, the question they are asked is: which do you want?

What I also noticed was that sometimes money does appear even after the local and state governments have been pleading poverty for many years. Why was there money for a new arena for the Detroit Red Wings at the same time the City of Detroit was in bankruptcy? Why did lower-income people have their water shut off if there was money for entertainment venues for higher income people? Why did the largest free-standing concrete dome in the world, Seattle’s King Dome, get imploded when it still had 15 years of bond payments left and get replaced by separate baseball and football stadiums? How did a $500M people mover connecting the BART trains to Oakland Airport go to the head of queue when a proposed $125M Bus Rapid Transit line that would benefit the lower-income parts of Oakland languished on the official to-do list of the Metropolitan Planning Organization for many years? The residents had to be without this badly needed improvement but not before its cost had risen to $232 million by the time it finally opened in the summer of 2020 (Wanek-Libman 2020).

FIGURE 1.1 Detroit – these railroads were used to support the automobile factories.

Source: Shutterstock (94909557)

I could go on. There are convention center expansions, new prisons, even casinos have received public support. The City of Detroit has a new automation feature in its downtown parking garage that will pack in cars tighter when much of the city has gone back to nature (Phelan and Wall Howard 2020). It will also eliminate the need for valets while the city suffers from high unemployment. One could understand how the public might choose to neglect sewer repairs since they are out of sight and out of mind. But does the citizenry really favor venues for private entertainment over repairing leaking roofs in their school buildings or filling the potholes? I could guess the answer, but the truth is that we usually don’t really know the public’s preferences. Elected officials can game the system. They won’t let the public vote on things they know would be unpopular, and they force a vote on things that are popular, but by attaching odious terms like an increase in property and sales taxes that hit hard those with fixed incomes.

FIGURE 1.2 Detroit – demolishing Joe Louis Arena as if there were not already enough destruction.

Source: Shutterstock (1609733881).

And higher levels of government have distorted the decision process. The US Interstate Highway system was built with 90 percent Federal Funds, that is, “free money.” But the Feds offered nothing at all if you would rather expand or build a rapid transit line. Only in the 1980s did a few cities like Portland, Oregon first manage to get highway funds transferred to transit. Modal favoritism still goes on, with many state departments of transportation refusing to help transit. The State of Indiana’s legislature actually made it illegal for the citizens of Indianapolis to choose light rail transit, ostensibly to protect the taxpayer. Even today, there is a maximum 80-20 split for highway projects but typically only 50-50 for transit for Federal matching funds. Beginning in 2001, the State of Maryland started a widening project for I-95 parallel to their MARC commuter rail system thereby undermining its purpose. An upgrade to MARC was finished as recently as 1992 in this same corridor. No doubt, some free money played a role.

The misnamed Interstate Highways are currently undergoing a new round of widening. In the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., I-66 is becoming a DMZ or Berlin Wall severing the north and south sides of Fairfax County. The Zoo interchange on the freeway encircling the City of Milwaukee was recently (not quite) finished using a combination of State and Federal funds at a total cost of over $1.7 Billion, a portion of that from rural residents of Wisconsin (Midwest Environmental Advocates 2020). As for the State’s contribution to transit “…over the last 12 years the Milwaukee County Transit System has eliminated 21 regular bus routes, 4 freeway flyer routes and numerous route segments, and reduced the frequency and span of many bus routes (Silver 2018).” No plans at all were made to serve the new FoxConn factory, located far outside the city, when the State of Wisconsin offered this company an extremely generous subsidy. This would put pressure to divert money from other transit services when existing “JobLines” routes to other suburbs were already in jeopardy (Williams 2018). Similarly, Austin, Texas is in a fast-growing region with substandard transit, but the state’s idea of help is to widen Interstate 35 by 4 lanes right through the heart of the city (Lee 2021). The city will have to go it alone with a transit plan that required a public vote, additional local taxes, and perhaps federal matching funds, but only if they are willing to delay for five or ten years due to intense competition with other cities also drowning i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments