THE U.S. CRUMBLING INFRASTRUCTURE

Today, the U.S. spends less than 2 percent of its GDP on infrastructure, less than at any point in the last twenty years. Meanwhile, Europe spends close to twice the U.S. rate, and China spends close to four times the U.S. rate.  The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report now ranks the U.S. overall infrastructure at 12th in the world – down from 7th place just a decade ago.

• One of every 9 bridges in the country is structurally deficient, and nearly a quarter are functionally obsolete. Almost one-third of the roads are in poor or mediocre condition, and more than 42 percent of all urban highways are congested.  Transit systems across the country struggle to address deferred maintenance and 45% of American households lack any meaningful access to transit at all.

• Much of the nation’s rail network is obsolete, even though energy-efficient railroads move more freight than ever. While the U.S. debates the merits of high-speed rail, countries across Europe and Asia have gone ahead and built vast high-speed rail networks with trains that run at 125-200 miles per hour.  Meanwhile, the Acela – Amtrak’s fastest train – travels at an average speed of just 65 miles per hour.

• America’s airports are bursting at the seams as the numbers of passengers and cargo have grown to all-time highs.   Moreover – and rather incredibly – U.S. airports still rely on antiquated 1960s radar technology, because of chronically underfunding of a new satellite-based air traffic control system.

• Bottlenecks at U.S. marine seaports – which handle 95% of all overseas imports and exports –prevent goods from getting to their destinations on time. The same is true for  inland waterways – which carry the equivalent of 50 million truck trips of goods each year.

• Right now, more than 4,000 of the nation’s 84,000 dams are considered deficient, and one of every eleven levees have been rated as “likely to fail” during a major flood.

• Much of the drinking water infrastructure is nearing the end of its useful life – and more than 2 trillion gallons of treated drinking water each year are lost through leaking pipes, faulty meters and nearly a quarter-million water main breaks. Wastewater treatment plants aren’t in much better shape: almost ten billion gallons of raw sewage are dumped into the nation’s waterways each year when plants fail or pipes burst.

• America’s aging electrical grid – which consists of a patchwork of power generation, transmission, and distribution facilities, some of which date back to the early 1900s – simply isn’t up to 21st century challenges, including resiliency to cyber-attacks. The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. grid at just 24th in the world in terms of reliability, just behind Barbados.

• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks the U.S. 16th in the world in terms of broadband access. The U.S. are only marginally better in terms of average broadband speed – 12th in the world.  Today, businesses, schools and families in Bucharest, Romania have access to much faster internet than most of the United States. 

The American Society of Civil Engineers says the U.S. need to invest $3.6 trillion by 2020 just to get the nation’s infrastructure to a state of good repair. That is $1.6 trillion short of current spending levels.

Moreover, there is an economic cost of not acting.  Several studies have concluded that U.S. deteriorating infrastructure already costs its economy close to $200 billion per year.