How To Fix Our Infrastructure— Before It’s Too Late

America's infrastructure is crumbling around us. And the warning signs flash all the way from India to here. Because of that country's size and population, moving commerce and travelers around the subcontinent poses major challenges. Unfortunately, India's 40,000-mile rail network is over 150 years old. Intercity rail traffic often exceeds 120 percent of capacity, moving at a glacial pace to preserve tracks wearing out faster than designed.

In America, we are fast approaching a similar crisis that is little understood by the public or most governmental officials. Bridges average 50 years in age, their typical intended life span. Metropolitan area drivers spent 4.2 billion hours-nearly a full week per motorist-delayed in traffic in 2007. Congestion costs our nation an unbelievable $78 billion annually!

Yet we will soon spend billions of stimulus dollars on infrastructure repair without knowing how best to improve a failing system. Remediation will cost more than $2.2 trillion, money that is unbudgeted amid today's financial plight.

To address these problems, we must build and rebuild on a massive scale. But America is burdened with an inefficient construction industry that is just as broken as the infrastructure itself. Forty-eight billion dollars in stimulus money went toward construction of roads and bridges, notwithstanding an industry whose inefficiencies totaled $120 billion in 2007.

By overhauling the way the construction industry operates, before spending billions more on infrastructure, we can make improvements that benefit Americans for generations to come.

Some solutions include:

- Enact reforms to avoid another Big Dig. Boston's Big Dig is history's most expensive highway project. Its original 1985 budget was just over $2 billion. The real cost will reach $22 billion.


The Big Dig epitomizes everything wrong with America's broken construction industry. We cannot afford overruns of 20 percent, 30 percent or more. We cannot afford the waste triggered by contractor inefficiency.

Construction is America's least productive industry. The average project wastes up to 50 percent of its total labor cost. Taxpayers cannot squander a hundred billion on poor job performance. Yet fixed-priced contracts would save billions.

Construction contracts should (1) be based on 100 percent complete architectural and engineering drawings; (2) include fixed prices for everything designed and approved by the jurisdiction; and (3) fairly apportion anticipated construction-related risks among all parties.

- Create a national clearinghouse and database, accessible to state transportation agencies and the public. The database would identify all infrastructure-related design and construction issues. A similar, federal database would alert state transportation departments of any bridge failure nationwide, and include methodologies for remediation, such as issuing maintenance alerts for America's 600,000 bridges.