What Infrastructure Crisis?

Despite two Congressional commissions and two former DOT Secretaries warning of the transportation funding crisis and its implications on Oct. 4, on top of a 2007 interstate highway bridge collapse killing 13 people, Ken Orski notes that Americans are largely unaware and/or uninterested in addressing America's deteriorating transportation infrastructure.

"It may be impolitic to suggest it, but dire warnings about the sorry state of the nation's infrastructure seem to come largely from organized interests - stakeholders and advocacy groups... But rightly or wrongly, congressional lawmakers often discount cries about "crumbling infrastructure" as self-serving demands for more government money...

Lawmakers witness New Jersey voters strongly approving Governor Chris Christie's decision to cancel work on the long-planned rail tunnel under the Hudson River because, says the Governor, "the state simply doesn't have the money" to pay for overruns in the potential $9-14 billion project. "

"As one of our colleagues, a sincere and lifelong transportation advocate, put it, "the transportation community is mostly talking to itself and living in denial about the changing political mood." That mood-in the nation at large as well as in the next Congress- is unmistakably becoming more conservative and skeptical of big government."

Thanks to Ken Orski