Remake America

Actually, it’s not time to make America great again. It’s time to remake America.

There are three principal Hudson River crossings connecting New York City to New Jersey and the nation. They are of course the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. They were all built before 1940. Similarly the rail tunnels that connect New York to New Jersey and the rest of the nation west and south of the city opened nearly 110 years ago. Replacing them has been called the most important U.S. infrastructure need.

A $9 billion project  with majority federal funding 10 years ago to build new rail tunnels would have been completed next year. Instead it shut down when Jon Corzine, the governor who moved it forward and got the funding, lost to Chris Christie, who terminated it with the lie that it was a bad project so he could seize the state’s 10 percent share to avoid raising the gasoline tax.

Ultimately the tax had to be increased but the tunnel project is kaput. There is no new tunnel, just the growing and looming catastrophe that the old rail tunnels will fail entirely before they can be replaced: Tunnels that carry commuter trains that take some of New Jersey’s highest income earners — and therefore some of New Jersey’s biggest state income tax payers — to and from their jobs every day. In public policy the dots connect. Mass transit is a straight line dot-to-dot connection to tax revenue.

In a story published Aug. 9, the New York Times reported the nation’s infrastructure spending decreased the past five years, the average U.S. road surface is 28 years old — up from 23 years  in 2000, and that while 31 states have increased transportation funding since 2012  the federal gas tax has been 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993 when  the equivalent today would be 31 cents a gallon.

The infrastructure shopping wish list in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area alone  easily tops $50 billion now and probably pushes toward $100 billion if you include modernizing the subway system. And then there’s the rest of the country. In Washington, they talk about a national $1 trillion infrastructure program but that’s as far as they have gotten — talking.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PA) has an infrastructure shopping list that includes a current $4 billion remake of LaGuardia Airport, extension of the PATH line from Newark Penn Station to Newark Airport and a new PA bus terminal but no agreement where to put it or how to pay for it.

The New York  subway system is past critical. The New York MTA has announced an $800 million emergency fix for a system dating to the turn of the 20th Century but  the real cost to bring it to 21st Century standards is said to be multiple billions of dollars.

In Washington they talk about funding infrastructure and the present president has promised it — but we know he lies about all things great and small and we know he has no clue how Congress works, much less how to work with the Congress even if there were a House and Senate that could and would work. But there isn’t and there is not likely to be any time soon.

A federal infrastructure bill would need to identify funding sources, federal and state shares of costs and responsibilities, establish systems, processes and the basis for rules and regulations to determine needs, allocate funding, identify and prioritize projects and manage hundreds of similar complex details. It will be thousands of pages in length, not a 140-character tweet. It has not been written and no one is writing it or likely to in this Washington.

New York, New Jersey and the PA, pledging to cooperate on new trans-Hudson rail tunnels, can’t even get an answer much less a commitment from the Trump administration for federal funding while in July  the estimated project cost hit $12.9 billion. Compare that to the $9 billion project Christie cancelled that would have been completed next year.

Anyone who has traveled recently in Europe or Asia knows the differences between modern and modernizing infrastructure and the state of dilapidation of America’s roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, train stations, airports and the rest — never mind what we can’t see like water and sewer systems and the electrical grid. In most first world nations trains, airports, roads, bridges, road and rail tunnels are a half-century or more ahead of the U.S. China is investing trillions of infrastructure dollars at home and around the world while our our infrastructure is second-world.

The present president has promised that $1 trillion infrastructure program, nearly equal to but two annual appropriations for the Defense Department. His number is a boast, not a policy. Policy takes expertise, planning and legislation.

The last president, not this one, the last one, President Obama, put in place a 30-year, $1 trillion program to upgrade and modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It makes sense to keep 6,800 nuclear warheads in shape (Russia has 7,000) if we are going to have them — though let’s not threaten anyone with their use. Really, let’s not. If the U.S. can pay for that, surely it can finance the same for infrastructure to support the world’s largest economy — $18 trillion annually now.

To put the need into perspective you have to go back 60 and 80 years to understand how tired and worn out American infrastructure is.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was an alphabet soup of programs and agencies. The Public Works Administration alone provided most of the $40 million it cost then to build La Guardia Airport in just four years.

The PWA built the TriBorough Bridge (now the RFK Bridge) and the Lincoln Tunnel — the latter constructed in less than four years at a cost then of $85 million. Other PWA projects, and there were hundreds, include the Cape Cod Canal, the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams, Los Angeles Airport and the highway connecting the Florida Keys to Florida mainland — all completed some 80 years ago.

A lot of other iconic American infrastructure got built the same time like the Golden Gate Bridge. Completed in four years, it opened in mid-1937 at a cost of $35 million.

No, we can’t make easy direct comparisons  in time or money  to what it would cost or how long it would take to do the kind of infrastructure projects we need now. It is estimated, for example, it will take eight years to build those  Hudson River rail tunnel if construction starts.

Today there are environmental and community reviews, approvals and permitting, OSHA requirements, labor agreement requirements, all sorts of complications that have been put in place for good public purposes that 1930s bureaucrats and builders did not face.

If you check on-line you will find there is a general notion that $1 in 1935 today is equivalent to $18. Does that mean you could build the Lincoln Tunnel today for 18 times the $85 million cost of it 80 years ago? I suspect it would be a lot more.

If the Democratic Party’s New Deal brought an astounding advance in building America so did the Republican Party’s Eisenhower administration. Ike brought to the White House a determination, forged from personal Army experience in 1919, that the nation needed a modern national highway system.

His policy resulted in what the Interstate Highway System. Constructed over a period of 35 years it is about 48,000 highway total miles that carry one-fourth of all vehicle mile trips in the nation yearly.

One source puts the cost of building the system in excess of $500 billion in today’s dollars. How many multiple trillions of dollars in commercial activity and progress has it funded? Would there be a franchise-based company listed on the New York Stock Exchange today if  America had not built a national highway system with all those off-ramps?

All of which takes us back to that one word, infrastructure and big questions?

Even if we could get sensible bipartisan agreement on how much to invest; could devise a reasonably fair formula to distribute the investment among 50 states; could identify the 10 most critical national infrastructure projects to be funded first — for example the Hudson River rail tunnels — even if all that could be agreed, could the legislation pass Congress with broad bipartisan support and be signed by into law? Would we as a nation make the inter-generational and cross-partisan commitment to pay for it one way or another?

Or will it take a cataclysm like the Great Depression or World War II to unite us to get it done? Isn’t the fact that U.S. infrastructure is crumbling cataclysmic enough to unite a nation more bitterly divided  than on the day they fired on Ft. Sumter — unite it for the purpose of  building 21st Century infrastructure to move and carry goods, services and people in the world’s largest economy?

Right now, we don’t have a government that can do what needs to be done and we definitely do not have someone in the White House who understands all the pieces that must fit together to create and fund a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to remake America.