A Bridge Too Far

Infrastructure Week takes place May 16–23. Its purpose is to make more people aware of the need to maintain and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure and of the role it plays in just about everything we do. As Infrastructure Week’s website puts it, “Roads, bridges, rails, ports, airports, pipes, the power grid, broadband… infrastructure matters to the goods we ship and the companies that make and sell them; it matters to our daily commutes and our summer vacations, to drinking water from our faucets, to the lights in our homes, and ultimately to every aspect of our daily lives.”

Here at Forester Media we publish six magazines, all related in various ways to aspects of the nation’s infrastructure: Erosion Control, Stormwater, Business Energy, Water Efficiency, Grading & Excavation Contractor, and MSW Management. (The “MSW,” if you’re not familiar with the publication, stands for municipal solid waste.) As our contribution to Infrastructure Week, the editors of all six collaborated to put together a list of questions that we then sent out to various experts in all of these fields. We’ll be posting many of their responses in the weeks before May 16, sharing the experts’ perspectives.

The results so far have been interesting, with quite different opinions on funding, for example, or on the role of private investment in what have traditionally been publicly funded assets. It’s important not just to do something, but to plan and prioritize and do it right—to make the outcome for our bridges more successful that of the title, so to speak.

Some of the results are already posted: You can see the responses here from Dennis Slater, president of the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, who responded to a request from Grading & Excavation Contractor magazine.

The four questions we asked the experts appear below, and we invite you to join in and list your responses to the questions in the comments any time between now and Infrastructure Week.

Here are the questions:

Which infrastructure projects should be given priority? Roads and bridges? Dams and levees? Water supply? Electrical grid?
Is there a solution to long-term infrastructure funding?
What kind of harm is the current state of our infrastructure doing to the economy and the community?
What can various government entities—from local to federal—do to attract private sector support and investment?

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