Fairfield County Weekly (8/8/07) Link
Is it merely a coincidence that the last three catastrophic bridge disasters resulting from structural failures were all interstate highways?
The collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis last week that killed at least four and injured dozens more gruesomely recalls the last two structural bridge tragedies, both of which happened in our neck of the woods.
Twenty years ago, the Schoharie Creek I-90 thruway bridge collapsed because of poor maintenance, killing ten and wounding untold others. Four years before that, a 100-foot section of the northbound lanes of the Mianus River bridge between exits 4 and 5 on I- 95 in Greenwich collapsed due to poor inspection, killing three and wounding three others as two trucks and two cars plummeted 70 feet into the void.
The common thread is that all three were bridges serving interstate highways: I-35W in Minneapolis, I-90 in New York, and I-95 right here in Fairfield County.
Three, of course, is not a statistically significant sample in virtually any context. Additionally, our Interstate Highway System has a total length of nearly 50,000 miles, or about 30 percent of the 160,000 miles of America's largest roads, so even by random chance one in three catastrophes would likely be of federally-funded interstate highways.
But the wide reach of the government, both federal and state, shouldn't act as an excuse for failure. Even if every inch of road in America was federally funded, any bridge collapse is one too many. Of the 27 global catastrophic bridge collapses listed by Wikipedia since 1940, nine were in America. Germany was in second place with five.
Does it matter that the highways are federally funded? After all, it is always the responsibility of the state to use those funds to build and maintain the roads and bridges (the only exception is the federally managed Woodrow Wilson bridge in Washington, D.C.). Indeed, the consensus report after the Mianus River disaster of 1983 was that the state of Connecticut was woefully deficient in its bridge inspection and maintenance. At the time, we employed 12 engineers who worked in pairs to inspect 3,425 bridges.
The answer is yes, it does matter, for three reasons.
Number one, it further decouples the costs from the benefits in decisions of where, when, and how to build roads. The best decision is made when the decision maker faces both the costs and the benefits. When you decide to repave your driveway, you will make the optimal decision for you, because you face virtually all of the costs and benefits yourself. When you live on a private road, you and your neighbors share some of the costs and some of the benefits in non-identical ways, i.e., some use less of the road than others, so it is likely to be a less optimal decision than if one person owned the whole thing, but the costs and benefits are still very localized. When a town hikes taxes to repair roads, they are essentially redistributing money from those that live far from the repairs to landowners near the repairs. You can start to imagine the conflicts of interest as small groups lobby for construction and maintenance where it is best for them. When it moves to the state level, it gets even worse. When it becomes federally funded, we end up with bridges to nowhere in Alaska and other pork roads as politicians funnel money to their states at our expense.
Number two, it increases our taxes and creates perverse incentives to look as pathetic as possible to beg for more of our own money back. We pay more in federal taxes than we receive in federal money back, and even the money we do get back, whether it's for highways or schools, is not spent the way we would have spent it if we had just kept our money.
Number three, federal money comes with dirty strings attached. You can't spend the cash as you would like, simply hiring the most efficient or reliable workers. No, you must cater to Washington's political demands, even when they are racist, unfair, and counterproductive, such as the Davis-Bacon act. Passed in 1931 with obvious discriminatory intent to keep cheaper migrant black workers from being employed by states using federal money, it requires workers be paid "prevailing wages," typically defined by the local unions, which at the time were groups of expensive white workers. The law is still on the books and it is still enforced: You are not allowed to find good deals as a matter of law. In addition, the federal government has often threatened to withhold funds unless states pass other laws. Some examples: speed limits, drinking ages, disclosing the identities of sex offenders, lowering the allowable level of intoxication, and requiring carpool lanes. Those should all be state decisions but the federal government teases us with our own money until we live how they say we should.
Can bridges and roads be built without federal assistance? Until 1956, they all were. That year, President Eisenhower, jealous of the German Autobahn, pushed through the Federal-Aid Highway Act, claiming we could have a national highway system built for $25 billion in 12 years. The final tally was $114 billion over 35 years.
Would roads and bridges built with our own money and for our own needs be safer? Unfortunately, they would almost have to be.