From hamburgers to automobiles, Americans like things super-sized. But now may be the time to downsize, at least as far as public works projects go.
New York Times architecture critic Louis Uchitelle recently lamented the "the superproject void," a dearth of mind-bogglingly expensive, overwhelmingly massive projects that change how things are done. He rattled off a list of projects that "altered the American landscape" including the Erie Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad and the Interstate Highway System. Some local projects get the nod as well, including the Washington D.C. Metro, San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system and Boston's Big Dig. There, he writes, "the list abruptly stops."
"For the first time in memory, the nation has no outsize public works project under way," he writes.
Harvard University political science professor Stephen Walt argues America is building superprojects, but not here.
These projects are titanic military bases and hulking embassies in distant and dangerous lands. Massive as those American oases may be, the costs don't quite seem to qualify them as superprojects -- excluding, of course, the cost of the wars those bases are built to support. But that is beyond the purview of a transportation blog. Besides, the United States built all sorts of interesting things at home and abroad during the Cold War, a distinctly less ferocious but much more widespread conflict.
Superprojects, according to Uchitelle, are "spectacular feats of engineering and ingenuity that greatly enhance the economy." Connecting large economies, to paraphrase a United Nations official Uchitelle quoted, doesn't hurt either. But the biggest projects currently underway -- New York City's Second Avenue Subway, California's high-speed rail line and Washington D.C.'s Dulles Metro Extension come to mind -- are somewhat less ambitious than the superprojects of yesteryear.
Enter the economic stimulus: $787 billion, sprinkled a few million at a time to the far corners of the economy like flour from a sifter. The stimulus is funding some interesting transportation ideas, including TIGER grants for multimodal transit. It could be instrumental in getting good ideas from blueprint to production -- California, for example, is counting on stimulus capital for its planned high-speed rail. But the main goal is getting people working again. The stimulus isn't funding any mind-blowing transportation projects, and there aren't any superprojects on the horizon.
But with the economy so bad, the deficit so high and existing infrastructure crumbling around us, a transportation superproject simply isn't wanted -- or warranted. We still can't find the money to fund a relatively straightforward transportation bill, let alone fix a system in such disrepair the American Society of Civil Engineers says we'd have to spend $2.2 trillion bringing it all up to snuff.
We should hold off on seconds, until we finish what's on our plate.
*Photo: Workers celebrate the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869. National Park Service. *
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