Time to Repair and Restore

Neglected streets and sewers, plus aged bridges and byways, hinder growth

From the rusting spans of its once proud bridges to the leaking sewers beneath its streets, America is structurally unsound. Highways are crumbling. Avenues are cracking. Trains jump their worn-out tracks. Coal ships languish outside overburdened ports. While the U. S. has the technological prowess to blast a magnificent space shuttle into orbit and land it gently back on earth, it has failed to care properly for its most important public works.

One morning two weeks ago, some New York City commuters living north of Manhattan awoke to a radio traffic bulletin even more dismal than usual. Because of a turbine breakdown at a Conrail power station, their trains into the city would be half an hour behind schedule. Fearing that the delays could be much longer, thousands of travelers took to their cars. But just as rush hour reached its bumper-to-bumper peak, a 4-sq.-ft. section of cement roadbed in the southbound lane of Manhattan's elevated West Side highway suddenly collapsed and tumbled to the ground below. While a repair crew patched the hole with a metal plate traffic backed up for three hours. Said one fatigued driver who reached his office at noon: "It's like Berlin after the war. Nothing works."

Every school-day morning on the Lilly Bridge near Altoona, Pa., children go through a poignant ritual that matches the plight of those commuters. A yellow bus parks just short of the decrepit 57-year-old structure, the doors swing open and its young passengers troop across the bridge on foot. Then the driver follows—slowly—to pick them up again, knowing that even if the bridge gives way under the weight of the bus the children will be safe.

These conditions are neither isolated nor unrelated. Urban planners and a growing number of politicians are worried about the bridges and byways, streets and sewers that make up the infrastructure of the U.S. economy. After decades of neglect by all levels of government much of that foundation is now in an advanced state of decay.

During the lean years of the 1970s many financially strapped states and depressed older cities were hard put to find money either for maintenance or for new construction. With teachers, welfare recipients, garbage collectors and senior citizens all expecting higher salaries or more services, government priorities tipped toward meeting social demands. Since 1965, the percentage of the U.S.'s gross national product devoted to investment in public works has dropped from 3.6% to 1.7%, a 52.8% decline. Like a pensioner gradually spending his lifetime's savings the U.S. is living off its public capital and little by little exhausting it.

This situation is felt most acutely in the declining cities of the Northeast and Midwest, and the old Southern river towns like New Orleans. But tight budgets are also threatening the infrastructure in the West. The effect of California's Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes by an average of 57%, has already shown up in the deteriorating condition of that state's streets and highways.