A bridge too far gone

WHETHER driven by grief or curiosity, local people in Minneapolis still congregate on the banks of the Mississippi River to see their collapsed bridge. It is a monumentally strange sight, and more so at night when the floodlights come on. Looking at the twisted beams and the mess of cars, it is hard to believe the death toll is so low—just five bodies have turned up so far, and eight others are missing. Nor, oddly, have the expected traffic jams occurred nearby. That is likely to change next month when schools reopen and students return to the University of Minnesota. What began as a tragedy and turned into a spectacle will linger as a nuisance.

Engineers who scrambled across America to check other bridges with the same steel-truss design are reporting that they appear safe. So too, they say, are most of the 73,784 bridges that, like the one in Minnesota, are classified as “structurally deficient”. The head of California's transport department stressed that he would not fear to cross the state's bridges with his family. Which is reassuring, as far as it goes—yet it entirely misses the point.

The problem with America's infrastructure is not that drivers are in danger of being pitched into rivers. Dramatic events may dominate the news, but the nation's roads and bridges are less perilous than inefficient and decrepit. Enormous sums are being spent just to keep them in a mediocre state, and even more will have to be spent in future. Partly as a result, the new infrastructure needed for a rapidly growing population is not being built fast enough. And America has been slow to find alternative ways of paying for new projects or for rationing the use of existing ones.

How bad is America's infrastructure? The fullest answer comes from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which grades the nation as though it were a schoolchild. Its first report, in 1988, issued three Bs (for aviation, flood defences and drinking water) and one D. All other systems were graded C. In sum, a slow pupil, but not a hopeless one. By 2005 America was a dropout, with no As or Bs, four Cs and ten Ds. Worryingly, the second-best grade went to the nation's bridges.

Americans do not really need such reports to tell them that something is wrong. They feel the problem every time they drive over a pothole (and they often do: some 27% of urban arterial roads were classified as poor in 2005). They sense it as they sit on the tarmac, waiting to take their turn on an overcrowded runway. Last year more than a fifth of American flights arrived more than 15 minutes late—the worst performance for six years. Most of all, they reflect on what has gone wrong as they sit in increasingly long traffic jams. In the ten years beginning in 1995, the number of miles driven has increased by 23%, while the length of the roads has gone up by 2%. The result is as expected.

Most appalling, perhaps, is the cost of maintaining such an indifferent system. Spending on infrastructure has risen steeply since the 1950s, even when inflation and population growth are taken into account (see chart). These days, most of the cash goes towards patching up crumbling stock. Spending on new projects and major renovations dipped in the 1970s and 1980s, but has since risen and is now higher even than in the golden era of highway-building.

The money does not go nearly as far as it did. Alan Soltani of Benham, a civil-engineering firm, reels off a list of reasons why new roads and bridges now cost so much to build. Labour and rights-of-way are far more expensive than in the past. Safety standards are stricter. Roads are wider. The cost of materials has risen steeply, not least because America must compete with countries (such as China) that are investing heavily in infrastructure. The price of structural concrete has gone up by 73% in the past two years alone. As a result, the network is growing only slowly. Between 1960 and 1965 America built 144,000 miles of new highway. Between 2000 and 2005 it added just 59,000 miles.

No state illustrates this pattern of boom, bust and forced boom better than California. In the 1960s it poured money into roads, pipelines and universities, on the assumption that it was the state's manifest destiny to grow. “We've got plenty of money and we've got to do it,” explained Pat Brown, then the governor. The result was a superb education system and a road network that seemed almost miraculous. Reyner Banham, a British architecture critic, judged the intersection of the 10 and the 405 freeways in Los Angeles to be “one of the greater works of Man”.

That intersection now features some of America's greater traffic jams. Thanks to several decades of under-investment and a steep increase in heavy-goods traffic, California's roads are a mess. According to the delightfully precise “international roughness index”, the only worse ones are in New Jersey—and New Jersey has the excuse of freezing winters. Levees are crumbling near Sacramento, threatening farmland and suburbs. No surprise that, egged on by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor, California's voters in November authorised nearly $20 billion in bond issues to pay for transport and another $4 billion for flood protection.

What was widely praised as a bold, far-sighted solution to the state's infrastructure problems is in fact little more than a Band-Aid. Bonds must be paid for out of general taxation. Since raising taxes in California is politically unpalatable, all the infrastructure measures have done is to release money that would have been spent in the future. They have also foisted the burden of paying for the state's roads onto the general tax-paying population, rather than onto those who use the roads most heavily. That is undesirable from an economic point of view—and a missed opportunity, because a simple way of making people pay for road use already exists.

The land of the free

The petrol taxes that paid for much of America's post-war freeway system have been eaten away by inflation and higher fuel efficiency. The federal tax, of 18.4 cents a gallon, has not been raised since 1993. California's 18-cent tax has remained unchanged since 1994. The state's motorists now pay about one-third as much in petrol taxes, in real terms, to drive a mile as they did in the early 1960s, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Yet raising such taxes is politically tricky. Twice in the past two years Minnesota's governor, Tim Pawlenty, has vetoed transport bills that included tax increases. “How dumb can they be?” he asked of the supporters of one bill—words that now haunt him.

This would matter less if private cash was flooding into infrastructure, or if new ways were being found to control demand. Neither is happening. In part because of the enormous market for government debt (which pays interest tax-free) it is often easier for states to pay for their own pipe-dreams rather than hand over projects to private developers. A new toll road in Texas, which is being built by a Spanish company, raised howls of outrage. Britain and Europe are far ahead of America in using public-private partnerships, just as they lead America in congestion pricing. “This is the land of the free,” notes Richard Little of the University of Southern California, wryly.

The collapse of the Minnesota bridge may help change attitudes. A national Gallup poll conducted soon afterwards found that more than half of all people thought the disaster hinted at broad flaws in the nation's transport system. Almost three-quarters favoured laws that would funnel $100 billion to repair bridges. Yet opinion polls tend to show strong support for spending on just about everything. The real question is whether Americans are prepared to pay more taxes in return for better infrastructure.

In one state, that question may soon be answered. A chastened Mr Pawlenty now appears to be considering an increase in the petrol tax.