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This Speakout has not been edited.

By Francis M. Miller

The recent collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis brought into sharp relief the matter of deteriorating infrastructure in a way that previous reports by blue ribbon committees could not. The response ranged from an immediate injection of $250 million to replace the bridge to a consideration of raising taxes to deal with the issue.

As a member of the Infrastructure 2050 Committee, based at the University of Colorado’s School of Engineering, and as a previous member of the Douglas County Planning Commission, I have lived in the petri dish of this problem for many years. The problems of infrastructure are not restricted to bridges and highways but range more widely.

It has been over 20 years and the bike trail system to the headwaters of Cherry Creek is still not completed, a task that should have taken five years at most. If you add up all the needs for the building and maintenance of schools, public buildings, highways, bridges and dams it rapidly becomes clear there is not enough money and there never will be.

After World War I, when Dwight Eisenhower was a young soldier, he led a caravan of military vehicles across the country towards San Francisco. The roads were mostly wagon trails back then and he recognized that without an effective interstate highway system we would never achieve our potential. When he became president he pushed for the system, part of which contains the Minneapolis Interstate 35 bridge.

Over the years we have progressed from the use of indigenous materials such as wood and steel to reinforce our bridges, highways and buildings to more technologically based materials such as reinforced concrete. The promise of future breakthroughs at the nano-molecular levels promises to yield superior materials that are more cost-effective. But, that does little to solve the problem of aging infrastructure built with older materials and to a set of specifications that are now out of date. This is compounded by the fact that nearly 50 percent of our infrastructure is beyond its half-life and increasingly vulnerable to overuse.

Consider bridges as one example. Pre-stressed concrete emerged on the scene in Denver, of all places. It involves tensioning cables and then pouring the concrete around them. When the concrete cures and the cables are released the concrete beams are vastly superior to the old method. The problem with this is two-fold. First, it took nearly 50 years to gain acceptance for this new way of doing things. The construction industry is notorious for embracing new technology at a snail’s pace. The risk of failure is so great that overengineering of old technology is viewed as superior to a deadly-embrace of some new-fangled, but as yet unproven, invention. So, when you examine our public portfolio of infrastructure, probably less than 40 percent of it is modern and up to date.

But there is more. In the case of bridges built with pre-stressed concrete using steel rebar, it is widely known that problems of corrosion and micro-cracking develop over time. Concrete is a porous substance and the use of de-icing salts will eventually penetrate the material, causing the concrete to deteriorate and the steel to corrode.

It is probably no surprise that the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge occurred in an area where snow is a chronic problem. Add to this recipe the constant pounding that these structures take from overloaded trucks and way too many vehicles and it is a wonder the bridge has stood as long as it has.

When you stand back and connect the dots, it is clear the infrastructure problem is as big a problem as health care and education. Our nation’s productivity is now inextricably linked to the use of trucks to transport our food, which travels an average of 1,500 miles before we buy it. The design of our cities has been reshaped by the automobile.

Urban densities have gone down, even as more of us moved from the farm to the city for jobs and opportunity. Without the automobile, getting to work and shuffling the kids from music lessons to soccer is an impossibility. Maybe it will change over the very long run, but in our lifetime this is the world in which we live.

If it were only a matter of earmarking monies for a bridge or raising the gas tax a few pennies we could grin and bear it. But it is far larger than an incremental political solution at the margin will allow.

It gets down to the fundamental values and priorities of how we as Americans live. A consumer society that pulls the equity out of its houses to buy big-screen TVs and is horrified at the notion of waiting until the plows have removed snow will be unable to accept the trade-offs necessary to deal with its long-term infrastructure. We want huge houses and we want a landscape with a view. We consider it our God-given right to leapfrog the problems of the inner city and move to the idyllic fringes and build new schools, hospitals and roads; the devil be damned when it comes to cleaning up industrial sites and old infrastructure that is crumbling behind us.

Minneapolis-St.Paul is one of the most cohesive communities in North America. There is no place that deals with community issues better. So, if the canary in the coal mine suddenly plops over dead, you can bet that there are more pervasive problems everywhere else. I suggest readers use GoogleMaps and do their own aerial survey of the Colorado Front Range.

It will be impossible won’t be able to ascertain which bridge will collapse next, but youthey will see a debris field and dross-scape that even a tornado couldn’t create.

Francis M. Miller is a resident of Parker.

READER COMMENTS

Speaking about infrastructure, I understand that we are still some 780 miles short on that border fence as promised to us long ago. And with the budget deficit likely to plunge to a mere 1.2% of GDP this year, what's up with that?

Why do so many people always think the answer to funding programs is to raise taxes.

The taxes collected currently on mulitple government levels is more than enough to fund all of the necessary expenses of providing services.

Eliminate the unnecessary expenses and the enormous amount of waste generated in government spending and use that windfall, rather than always looking to the citizens to cough up even more of our hard earned dollars.

Half my earnings already go to the government. When is enough enough?

But... but... if we used the surplus, we could not raise taxes! If we used the money we take in taxes now for the things that matter instead of all the crap we do now, we could have a great road system.

I vote we revoke welfare.... Plenty of money then.

I had said many times that a bridge would have to collapse and kill someone to get an increase in the taxes needed to rebuild all the bridges that are unsafe. I was wrong. Since the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis, I have heard little support for raising gas or any another taxes. What I have heard is that the existing taxes are not going first to replace bridges that are unsafe. What is needed is for Congress to first "ear mark" all the gas tax that is currently collected to be used for replacement of bridges already identified as unsafe. If that is not enough to replace those bridges within ten years, then they should increase the gas tax. If Congress wants to approve other projects, let the funding for those come from an additional increase in hte gase tax or from other taxes. I know there are other needs like bike paths, better off ramps and better ways to reduce traffic congestion but the first priority must be safety. Right now the greatest danger seems to be from bridge collapses.

I had said many times that a bridge would have to collapse and kill someone to get an increase in the taxes needed to rebuild all the bridges that are unsafe. I was wrong. Since the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis, I have heard little support for raising gas or any another taxes. What I have heard is that the existing taxes are not going first to replace bridges that are unsafe. What is needed is for Congress to first "ear mark" all the gas tax that is currently collected to be used for replacement of bridges already identified as unsafe. If that is not enough to replace those bridges within ten years, then they should increase the gas tax. If Congress wants to approve other projects, let the funding for those come from an additional increase in the gas tax or from other taxes. I know there are other needs like bike paths, better off ramps and better ways to reduce traffic congestion but the first priority must be safety. Right now the greatest danger seems to be from bridges collapsing.

The state of Minnesota had a $1.8 billion budget surplus in 2006 and chose to do nothing about a problem that they knew existed for a decade.

Ditto most of the USA. Wose fault is that?

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