Building Infrastructure-Building Experience

This week’s Citiwire.net columns by Neal Peirce and Alex Marshall focus on the promise of high speed rail as the “New Deal” for transportation.  “My high-speed rail proposal,” President Obama is quoted as saying, “will lead to innovations that change the way we travel in America. We must start developing clean, energy-efficient transportation that will define our regions for centuries to come.”

Certainly, the costs of the projects will be challenging, but more than that, “America’s become tortuously slow, way behind world standards, in building any kind of infrastructure,” according to Peirce. “Some states spend years just adding HOV or exclusive bus lanes to existing highways.”

Marshall reports that former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, a big rail booster, says that over-budget, drawn-out infrastructure construction has become the norm.  State and local governments tolerate huge multi-year delays.  “The cure, says Dukakis is competence: to learn to undertake great projects again, and to value quality government.”

The I-81 corridor project, whatever form it takes, will be of a scale not experienced in Syracuse since the viaducts were originally planned and constructed.  Our elected officials and transportation authorities will have to exhibit the scale of leadership and guidance that a project of its magnitude requires.