Street Smarts

Infrastructure is a boring word, spending has become a dirty word, and Congress has worried more about the $14 trillion national debt than the 9% unemployment rate. Last fall, when President Obama proposed to spend $50 billion to rebuild “roads, rails and runways,” GOP leaders blasted his plan as a tax-and-spend boondoggle.

But now that Obama has proposed a new jobs plan that includes major upgrades to crumbling schools and rickety bridges, and lawmakers are finding their approval ratings even lower than the President’s, infrastructure may be back on the agenda. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, two groups that couldn’t agree on the color of concrete, have both endorsed Obama’s push for public works. The cost of borrowing is at a historic low, and a global economy demands new efficiencies at home, like high-speed rail. Even Republican leaders have expressed sympathy for the idea of getting America’s house in order. “Infrastructure investments is an area where we should work together,” House majority leader Eric Cantor tweeted after Obama’s Sept. 8 jobs speech. The challenge is to do more with less: to rebuild America in a way that is smarter, greener and cheaper for taxpayers. That means focusing more on technology and less on asphalt, more on government policies and less on government projects, more on national priorities and less on sprawling pork-barrel roads and bridges to nowhere. Why build billion-dollar lock expansions to relieve barge congestion on the Mississippi River when better scheduling and peak-hour pricing could solve most of the problem at virtually no cost?

(See a report card on the stimulus.)

Before adding lanes to clogged highways, employers and states could encourage telecommuting, carpooling and mass transit to take cars off the road. Or freight-rail improvements to take trucks off the road. Or computerized traffic management to steer drivers away from jams. Or zoning changes to allow denser housing near job centers and train stations. Such a change of thinking requires a creative approach to the laws of supply and demand, with a goal of reducing demand (for landfills, power plants, jails, even sewers) before adding supply. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” once sounded like a granola eco-mantra, but as landfills overflow, it’s sounding more like sensible waste-management policy. “We’re making decisions today that we’ll live with for 50 years,” says Peter Binney, a Colorado engineer who led an effort for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to rate public works according to sustainability. “We can’t keep doing things the way we always have.”

Green Highways
A smarter approach to America’s infrastructure crisis is brewing underneath Philadelphia, where an aging “combined sewer system” that collects wastewater and storm water in the same pipes dumps raw sewage into the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers during heavy rains. Engineers have proposed a $9 billion storage tunnel under the Delaware to stop overflows and comply with EPA regulations. But Mayor Michael Nutter doesn’t have $9 billion, and if he did, he wouldn’t want to bury it 150 ft. underground.

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Instead, the city has launched a remarkably aggressive campaign to keep storm water out of its sewers in the first place with the help of rain barrels and rain gardens, vegetated green roofs and permeable green roads, new trees and new parks. A green road looks like any other road, but rain that falls on it slowly percolates underground instead of zipping into a storm drain. The eventual goal is to capture runoff from one-third of the city’s impervious surfaces and make 15 sq. mi. of man-made, urban jungle function more like a natural forest.

Nutter, who has pledged to turn Philadelphia into the greenest city in America, has a nice riff about treating water as a resource instead of a waste product and how it’s fun to convert parking lots into parks. But he isn’t some tie-dyed hippie tree hugger. He wouldn’t be so excited about green infrastructure if he didn’t think it could help him comply with the Clean Water Act for about $7 billion less than a giant tunnel would cost.

(See pictures of New York City going green.)

“It’s revolutionary, but it’s really a no-brainer,” Nutter says. “We help the environment, and we don’t have to waste all that money tearing up the city.”

What Nutter and his team are doing with porous basketball courts and man-made wetlands is a model — not just for wastewater projects, which the EPA expects to cost the U.S. nearly $400 billion by 2030, but also for the reconstruction of a cash-strapped country. And just as smart water management can save money and the environment, so can a more strategic approach to electric power. During the 2008 campaign, Obama got fired up about the smart grid. America’s electric grid is an analog network trying to survive in a digital world, reliant on switches that still need to be switched by hand and transformers that haven’t been transformed in a century. Alexander Graham Bell would be flabbergasted by modern telecommunications, but Thomas Edison would still recognize the technology in our substations. Like the sewer system, the power grid is classic infrastructure: out of sight, out of mind — except when it doesn’t work, like the time tree branches knocked down lines outside Cleveland in 2003 and blacked out most of eight states.

But even if the federal government had the money to magically upgrade the system, connect sunny deserts and windy plains to populous cities (the grid part) and install digital meters that could give consumers real-time feedback about their electricity use (the smart part), it would not solve the problem or be the best use of taxpayer funds. Utilities own most of the grid, and they can afford to upgrade it themselves. The real obstacles to new power lines are states and not-in-my-backyard communities that deny the necessary permits, as well as arcane cost-allocation issues that require regulators to make clear who would benefit from the projects. Those are the kind of problems that even a gigantic spending package can’t solve.

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So far, the new digital smart meters have been a political dud, partly because of unfounded fears about radiation and inaccuracy and partly because they can’t provide much useful information until consumers buy slick in-home displays and state regulators let utilities vary electricity rates to lower prices at times of peak demand. But the less visible elements of the smart grid — sensors, routers and other Buck Rogers — style gadgetry — are already providing benefits behind the scenes. Utilities no longer have to send meter readers to homes every month or deploy battalions of trucks to troubleshoot entire neighborhoods when someone reports a problem.

And the new gizmos are helping the grid monitor and heal itself. In January, for example, millions of Americans watched Stanford’s football team win the Orange Bowl. None of them knew that an aging transformer nearly overloaded while feeding power to the stadium, triggering voltage alerts that gave new meaning to the phrase red zone. Thanks to high-tech equipment installed through a $200 million smart-grid grant to Florida Power & Light, transformers that used to be checked manually once a year were being monitored electronically every second. The new equipment detected the problem and diverted power elsewhere. “It would’ve been embarrassing if the stadium had gone dark,” says Bob Triana, the operations manager for FPL’s Energy Smart Florida project. “I mean, it might not have gotten to that point. But I’m glad we didn’t find out.”

(See the top 20 green tech ideas.)

Smart building, whether of a more efficient water-management system or a smarter grid or a better transportation network, depends on three principles. First, reduce demand. Philly’s strategy of decreasing the volume of storm water that its sewers need to manage instead of building capacity can apply well beyond sewers. Most people don’t think of electricity conservation as related to infrastructure, but every “negawatt” saved through efficiency mandates for buildings and appliances that waste less energy is a megawatt from a new coal-fired power plant that doesn’t have to be built. The same logic applies to strategies that reduce driving, water use and trash; think nega-roads, nega-reservoirs and nega-dumps.

Second, look for creative solutions over concrete. In coastal Louisiana, where a football field’s worth of wetland vanishes every hour, the flood walls that had wetlands in front of them survived Hurricane Katrina without a problem, while flood walls left exposed by erosion collapsed and drowned New Orleans. But lawmakers still push costly new levee projects that could destroy more wetlands and endanger more lives while a massive wetland-restoration effort continues to languish. The ASCE estimates that it would cost $12 billion to repair America’s 4,000 structurally deficient dams. It may make more sense to instead remove them, restoring rivers, fisheries and recreational opportunities that do more for the economy than the dams ever did. More than 800 dams have already been dismantled in the U.S. A 210-ft.-tall dam on Washington’s Elwha River, scheduled for demolition this fall, will be the largest to go.

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Finally, look for private solutions. For the U.S. to match South Korea and Japan in top-of-the-line broadband that can help children learn, telecoms and cable companies will need to build the networks. To match Germany and Sweden in electronic medicine that can reduce costs and improve service, doctors and hospitals will need to adopt their technologies. By and large, Philadelphia’s green infrastructure will be privately built. Most of the city, after all, is privately owned. Nutter’s government is encouraging property owners to reduce their runoffs through financial incentives like tax credits for green roofs, mandates like a rule that all new buildings must absorb the first inch of rainfall on them in a storm and technical assistance to help businesses and homeowners deal with drainage issues. The water department has used Google Earth — type technology to set sewage rates according to square feet of impervious surface rather than square feet of property; that’s provided even stronger incentives for landowners to plant vegetation on parking lots and rooftops.

Philadelphia had one green roof in 2006. Now it has more than 60. Rain gardens are sprouting in its playgrounds, and the city’s first green street absorbed 6 in. of rain during Irene. Water commissioner Howard Neukrug proudly reports that one of the city’s 2,000 residential rain barrels was recently stolen. “We’re coming of age!” he jokes. Philadelphia, he says, will look very different in a few decades. “You can already see how these beautiful new green sites are slowly changing the city,” he says.

(See TIME’s special report “The Green Design 100.”)

None of these decisions will be easy in a market-based democracy. China is frenetically building bullet trains, transmission lines and wind and solar plants; its leaders don’t have to worry too much about opposition to new tracks, wires or turbines, much less Tea Party disgust with Big Government. Communities fight unsightly transmission lines and wireless towers, politically influential telecoms fight broadband expansions that could break up their local monopolies, and environmentalists fight wind farms they deride as “condor Cuisinarts” and solar projects that might disturb gopher tortoises.

The U.S. is like an old factory with a leaky roof and obsolete machinery, and the shareholders revolted last year. The CEO wants to make capital investments to keep up with the competition, but countries, like companies, have to be prudent with their cash when they’re drowning in debt. From now on, if we’re going to invest, we’ll need real returns. That will require big changes.

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