The Thinkers’ Guide to Infrastructure

If there’s one thing pretty much everyone can agree on when it comes to legacy infrastructure, it is that, by and large, it doesn’t really work anymore.

American interstates have become tangled messes of gridlock. City streets yawn with potholes. New York’s century-old aqueducts supplying water to the city could collapse. London will likely need a new sewer system as their local climate gets wetter and wetter.

But there seems to be movement on the horizon. It was recently reported Florida is ponying up for a high-speed rail network. So is California. It will cost billions and take years to construct, but funds allocated from the TARP for rail transport mark a sea change in American thinking. One day, CSX may no longer have the right away, and paying passengers needing to get from A to B on time will.

This week in the blog, we’ll consider a few of the transit networks, bridges, ports and highways around the corner, and how the bad economy is pushing these once pie-in-the-sky ideas to the top of the to-do list.