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The World Socialist Web Site reports
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released its quadrennial "Report Card" last month on the condition of infrastructure in the United States. Once again, the association gave the country an overall grade of D+, the same as in 2013.
The report is a damning appraisal of the state of American society under capitalism, and the Obama years, which saw essential social needs starved of funding while the stock market tripled in value and vast public resources were squandered on war. This will only accelerate under Trump.
The ASCE report assesses the state of sixteen different categories of infrastructure: aviation, bridges, dams, drinking water, energy, hazardous waste, inland waterways, levees, parks and recreation, ports, rail, roads, schools, solid waste, transit and wastewater.
Twelve of the sixteen sections evaluated earned a D grade. The report defines a D grade as "The infrastructure is in poor to fair condition and mostly below standard, with many elements approaching the end of their service life. A large portion of the system exhibits significant deterioration. Condition and capacity are of serious concern with strong risk of failure."
According to ASCE, the total costs to bring all US infrastructure into an adequate condition would exceed two trillion dollars.
[...] ASCE's answer to this crisis is not only inadequate but downright reactionary.
[...] In the section of the report titled "solutions to raise the grade" the authors suggest that "Infrastructure owners and operators must charge, and Americans must be willing to pay, rates and fees that reflect the true cost of using, maintaining, and improving infrastructure." Other sections advocate "user generated fees", hiking the gasoline tax, and other regressive proposals that would disproportionately affect the country's poorest citizens. The report also calls for more "public-private" partnerships, along with the streamlining of approval for private investment in public infrastructure projects.
Such free-market measures would only create an ever-greater class-based infrastructure system, where only those who could afford to will be able to drive on high toll expressways and bridges, send their children to quality schools, drink clean water, and live in areas not threatened with constant flooding or environmental disasters.
View the ASCE's report card here.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday April 17 2017, @05:15PM
The United States has better air transportation than it's ever had. You can fly across the country more safely and faster than ever before
This is false. You could fly across the country faster in the 1970s than now. Planes used to fly significantly faster back then, because they didn't care about fuel economy much (fuel was cheap and ticket prices were high), and it was also much faster to get on the plane since they didn't have TSA. Safely, I'll grant you that, but not faster. Air travel is a lot slower now than it's been since the rise of passenger jets.
There's always room for more improvement, but the U.S. infrastructure is and has been improving for a long time.
The other thing you're missing is competition. 50 years ago, the US was the most industrialized nation on the planet, so even if it was lackluster in some ways, it didn't have any competition beating it, so it was #1 by whatever transportation metric you choose. This just isn't true any more. Lots of other countries are now far superior to the US in many ways, especially air travel. Our air travel is the very worst in the industrialized world; any non-US carrier will give you a far better experience than any US carrier. In Europe, Japan, etc., you can get around very quickly and efficiently with high-speed rail, which basically doesn't exist here in the US. Roads in places like Germany and Japan are far, far, far superior to those here. In short, everyone else is passing us by. This will take a toll on us economically, as more and more commerce goes to other places and the US turns into an economic backwater.