For almost forty years, my father was the city administrator for a small town in Kentucky. And in every one of those years, decisions had to be made over one of the city's most expensive activities -- repaving streets. Depending on the weather, the level of traffic, and the structure of the underlying roadbed, some streets started to crumble in as few as five or six years. Others could make it two or three decades with only a little patching to see them through between major resurfacing projects.
Even in a small town, the twists and turns of cross streets and subdivisions add up to hundreds of miles of road, and in any given year maybe somewhere between 2 and 10 percent of those streets need a new surface. It's enough to stress the budget of any town, and if you've ever lived in a community where the budget is getting tight, you've probably experienced how a decade of neglect can turn the roads into rubble.
Fortunately for my town, and for the difficult task of making the money stretch over the miles, there were some roads that never seemed to need resurfacing. Year after year they held up fine, without even the potholes and patches that the other areas needed. For those roads I had another kind of family connection. My grandfather helped to build them. In 1937.
Those roads created by the Works Progress Administration were built of heavy concrete, with seams for expansion and curved gutters molded into the curbs. When you got close to the center of the city, they were fitted with metal rings fixed at regular intervals -- places for people to hitch their horses when they came to town.
What it would have cost to build new roads to the same standard, I have no idea. But decade after decade those roads held up, even as the newer paths were resurfaced again and again. Eventually, those concrete roads did fracture to the point where they were buried under a coat of asphalt, but by then they'd made it at least twice as long as any other road in town. My grandfather was proud of his work for the WPA, even if some folks had snickered behind their hands and called it We Piddle Around. How much piddling they did, I can't say, but they built good roads.
Back then, the WPA employed about 3 million people and spent over $4 billion building roads and a couple of billion more on other infrastructure projects. Workers were paid prevailing wages, but work weeks were limited to 30 hours. Employment was their major product, but the side effect was an explosion of infrastructure. Between 1935 and 1943 the WPA paved 651,000 miles of road. They built 78,000 bridges, some of them over canyons where workers performed incredible stunts to see the chasm spanned. The expansion of the transportation grid wasn't limited to roads. 800 airports were added or expanded. Along with the Civilian Conservation Corps, the WPA had a hand in creating over 8,000 parks.
President-elect Obama has now expanded the employment goals of his infrastructure development program to a proposed 3 million workers, and told state and local governments to expect quick approval of infrastructure projects ready to go. The dollar price will of course be higher, but it looks very much as if we're about to repeat the WPA's burst of infrastructure construction.
To which we should all say: no. Don't do it.
America was a very different country in 1935. There was no Interstate highway system. Many more people lived on rural farms. Very few of the highways in rural areas were paved. The WPA built the America we know.
But since the end of World War II, we've embroidered the nation that WPA built with more than 45,000 miles of multilane interstate and raised the total amount of paved roads in the country to over 4 million miles. The last thing, the absolutely last thing, that America needs now is more miles of highway. Pave another half a million miles of road, and you end up repaving up to fifty thousand miles of that a year. And the costs of infrastructure goes up sharply when that new highway starts to attract housing development.
A hundred billion dollars invested in new highways is no investment at all. It's a commitment to spend another ten billion a year. Forever. Recreating the employment and energy of the WPA is a great idea. Replicating the outcome is begging for a white elephant we can't afford.
When those infrastructure projects start to come in from the states, the administration should focus on three areas: repair, replace, and remove.
First priority should go to those projects that flat out eliminate the majority of costs associated with a piece of infrastructure. Nothing costs less in the future than a mile of highway that's been removed. Next should come those projects that offer the chance to upgrade existing infrastructure with an alternative whose future upkeep is less costly. This can include tearing out highways and adding more light rail. It should also include replacing older bridges and structures with newer designs that meet safety concerns while requiring less upkeep. Dead last on the list should come any project whose goal is to add more lanes for automobile traffic.
If we spend a hundred billion, employ a million people, and don't get a mile of new highway out of it, we should count ourselves lucky. Our goal should be to come out of this construction with a need for less maintenance in the future, not more.
If we can't find enough highway to tear out, there's another place where we could use some serious infrastructure upgrades: state and national parks. Many of the beautiful lodges and trails in our parks were built by the WPA or CCC in the 1930s, and while those structures are a treasure, they're a treasure now badly in need of some polish. Turn a million people lose on restoring those structure to their original glory. And if we want to add a few rooms here or trails there, that's fine -- so long as we employ the kind of skilled architects and artists that helped make these structures so wonderful in the first place.
Telling state governments to turn over the projects that are ready to go is fine, but if those projects turn out to be new roads, new bridges, and more miles of blacktop, we should hand them right back.