Florida’s experience and now Pennsylvania’s attest to the degree to which the slow pace of construction in the United States is both a choice and a luxury.
On Sunday, June 11, a section of overpass highway on Interstate 95 near North Philadelphia collapsed, disabling both sides of this major roadway. The structural failure occasioned bouts of serious apprehension about the logistical disruptions that would follow in the “months” officials said it would take to fully repair one of the most critical arteries in the Northeast.
What the collapse did not occasion was any indication that this highway’s collapse represented a test, not just for the Pennsylvania-based custodians of this section of interstate but for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who quickly took ownership of this disaster and has quite a lot to prove. That trepidation on the part of political observers contrasted with the “test” they imposed on Florida governor Ron DeSantis in the wake of Hurricane Ian. Because DeSantis passed his “test” rather easily, I posited at the time that the American political class didn’t want to risk inviting potentially unflattering comparisons between the Florida governor’s post-disaster performance and Buttigieg’s or, for that matter, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s. It turns out that we were all too pessimistic.
The compounding series of disasters experts assumed would follow that roadway failure never happened. The freight disruptions, supply-chain problems, and stalled traffic patterns stretching back miles didn’t materialize. Drivers quickly learned to take alternate routes around the collapse, and over-the-road truckers adjusted. Moreover, Governor Shapiro announced on Tuesday that construction crews working round the clock had completed temporary repairs to the point that I-95 will reopen to traffic this weekend. Though the circumstances are distinct and repairing this small section of I-95 is a more modest challenge than rebuilding the Pine and Sanibel Island bridges, the alacrity with which these works were completed is impressive, given the usual sluggish pace of construction.
“This is what it looks like when the ingenuity of Delco meets the grit of Philly,” Shapiro said on Tuesday. “This is what happens when we all come together.” That’s true in more ways than one. This impressively speedy repair work is indicative of how fast things can get done in this country when a consensus forms around the criticality of a particular project. Florida’s experience and now Pennsylvania’s attest to the degree to which the slow pace of construction in the United States is both a choice and a luxury.
It’s tempting to attribute the speed with which these roadways were repaired to the extent to which a disaster focuses the minds of policy-makers. But these achievements are more revealing of the priorities that make construction in the U.S. on a non-emergency basis a wildly expensive, multi-year proposition.
“So the lesson is why don’t we apply some of these same things to the other projects?” asked Bob Pishue, an analyst with the transportation-analytics company Inrix, in an interview with Vice reporter Aaron Gordon. “And I think that’s a completely fair question.” So fair, in fact, that it goes unanswered in that report. It is not because the process of design, acquisition, surveying, and engineering is more complicated today than it was a century ago, when American skyscrapers sprouted up like mushrooms. Nor is that entirely attributable to the additional complexities surrounding funding and contract negotiation for big projects. It is a question of values.
Today, we value federal permitting processes and the army of lawyers and regulators that a prolonged licensing review supports as much as, if not more than, the project itself. We value land-use restrictions, zoning laws, and other regulations more than we do the increased availability and affordability of housing. We value the ideal of urban density over and above the lifestyle homebuyers actually want. We value the input of organizations with vested interests in limiting or thwarting development entirely to such an extent that major projects are often delayed while their costs balloon to the point of being prohibitive. On an emergency basis, by contrast, the red tape is dispensed with, and the environmental impact studies, legal reviews, and project labor agreements take a backseat.
Recent experience suggests there are more political rewards available to public figures who reject the managerial sclerosis that has become so typical of big public and private works that it’s not even scandalizing anymore. It doesn’t have to be that way. These are choices. We don’t have to make them.