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The Planetizen News Brief - 11/26/09

26 November 2009 - 5:00am
Smart City Radio

The Planetizen News Brief is a weekly rundown of some of the most interesting and important news and issues of the past week.

The Planetizen News Brief airs every week on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Smart City", which is broadcast in cities across the U.S. Learn more about Smart City and listen to archived shows.

Full Transcript:

Aging infrastructure can be a messy problem. The collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis in August 2007 highlighted the trouble and human toll that can come from neglected infrastructure. But beyond such devastating anomalies, day-to-day infrastructure problems are plaguing America – especially as we get into the rainy season. An investigation from the New York Times looked into the country’s aging sewer infrastructure and found that growing populations and rainfall often combine to overwhelm sewage facilities. As a result partially treated or completely untreated human waste overflows into the nation’s waterways and lakes. An examination of reports from the Environmental Protection Agency showed that more than one third of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems have experienced these overflows in the last three years. It’s a stinky problem that violates the Clean Water Act and endangers many Americans by polluting drinking water sources. And as cities continue to grow, the problems stemming from this outdated infrastructure – some of it more than 100 years old – are likely to grow.

But some places might not have to worry about population stressing their aging infrastructure. A recent article from USA Today shows that America’s booming suburbs are starting to slow down their pace of expansion. Some are even losing population. 53 of America’s cities with populations over 100,000 had been growing at double-digit rates over the last two decades. But over the last two years, more than half of those cities have actually lost population. The age of the boomburbs may be coming to an end. And it seems that the real estate bubble is mostly to blame. Most of the cities that had experienced those high levels of growth only to plummet in the last two years are the same cities that had relied almost entirely on the real estate boom to fuel their economies. So now these declining cities are going to have to shift gears from rapidly growing juggernauts to more modest – and some might even say shrinking – smaller cities.

And finally, it once was the nation’s biggest and most expensive public works project, and after years of delays and troubles, the Big Dig could finally be coming to a close. They said it was finished two years ago, but as the Boston Globe reports, the state has yet to create footbridges and links between the new parks the project created. But now, with $30 million in federal stimulus money in their pockets, state environmental officials have opened construction bids on the first of three planned footbridges between the new park spaces. Leftover stimulus money will be combined with other sources to finish the other bridges in the coming years, finally bringing to a close one of the most drawn-out public projects in American history.

Stories Discussed in This Week's News Brief:

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At a much larger economic scale, however, one mustn’t avoid calculating the tremendous and exceptional externalities of automobile dependency.
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