For the better part of six months we have been bombarded by arguments that we need to finance “shovel-ready projects.” The New Deal is often cited as an example; let’s put people who were recently building tract houses in the Inland Empire to work on road crews.
There are two flaws with this logic.
- It ties us to the same waste of resources that got us into this mess. We had way too much of our economy tied to construction (and finance, which may or may not be a different story). We need to transition to a new deployment of resources. Basic infrastructure made some sense in the 1930s as we tried to digest the wave of unskilled immigration we experienced in the 1920s, but it is hardly the most promising avenue for the future. Increasing the proportion of our economy in knowledge industries probably makes a bit more sense.
- The emphasis on readiness gets in the way of creativity. Whether projects begin today or a year from now is not a great concern, especially since the scale of government spending we are contemplating today is going to preclude us from doing it again in the near future. Measure twice when you can only cut once.
Stockholm and Paris recently had design competitions for major urban renewal projects. It is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing on this side of the Atlantic. First, Stockholm, which has the somewhat modest goal of replacing their aging Slussen (think Central Artery). Here is what it looks like today:
And here is the somewhat more interesting conception from the Danish firm BIG:
Unfortunately, the plaza is far too open for a Nordic winter; without trees, it is going to be a bleak crossing, and the stacked approach creates an awful lot of hidden zones that would be dangerous in an area not populated by Swedes. Still, it is a progressive approach to maintaining traffic flow while reclaiming some surface area to the automobile.
The Parisian mandate was more broad – build the city of 2030. Curiously, a number of the teams hit upon the same issue – the aboveground rail lines that lead to the Gare du Nord and the the Gare de l’Est (each inexplicably close to the other, incidentally) cut up the city. I have my doubts that any of the major plans will be put into place – is France really going to tear down ugly housing projects to build its version of Central Park surrounded by tall office buildings, when the first attempt to do so produced La Defense:
What about the US? One of the challenges of our decentralized political system is that it is exceptionally hard for us to get anything done. The TGV from Paris to Marseille covers 411 miles in 3:14. Amtrak’s Acela limps along the 440 miles from Washington to Boston in 6:45. Partially this is due to US rules that trains have to be heavy to withstand crashes – perhaps a good policy, since Amtrak likes to crash – but the main issue is that our government has not figured out how to straighten tracks and overrule municipalities that want to impose speed limits.
So we still struggle to impose congestion pricing. We have some decent urban plans – how replacing this chunk of Manhattan:
with something like this:
Since the capital markets are not there for private interests to build today, why not develop the public segments today and let the area take root?
