I-35 Bridge Collapse: New Orleans II Conservative Economics in Action.

I agree Canada isn't a paradise and the Bush Admin. certainly isn't the immediate culprit here. That said this should be a wake up call that has been long in coming that we have neglected our infrastructure. Heck the failure of the levees in Katrina should've told us that or for that matter we shouldn't need tragedies to tell us that.

GW Bush is the current occupant of the White House and he's been there for almost 8 years now. He has had chances to remedy the situation and hasn't but he still has an opportunity to do so.

I try to keep an even keel most of the time here but this situation is pissing me off. I'm sick of hearing excuses and defensiveness when its clear that our government is failing to meet some of its most basic functions. I'm sick of hearing excuses for why we can't fund more infrastructure, some projects have been wasted, we don't want to raise taxes and etc... If it takes getting pissed about the current occupant of the Whitehouse to get something changed then so be it.

 

Privatization is an option worth considering but many private projects have also been mismanaged too. Privatization isn't a panacea.

We need accountability but at the same time given the sorry state of much of our infrastructure we need to act. We needed to act years ago..

 

Bridges have failed before. I watched an hour long show about it last night on the History channel. Sadly, it typically takes something like this to happen before changes are made. But the blame is ignorantly pointed at the federal gov't in this thread, which is borderline moronic.

80,000 bridges have this same "structurally deficient" ranking. But none were determined to be hazardous.

Look at the history of the U.S. as well as other countries. It is almost always status quo until something happens.

Speaking of Fed Funding, why was I-10 torn up and rebuilt 15 years later? That road certainly wasn't "structurally deficient."

Privatization is the best way to handle this. I watched another program on building the Hoover and Grand Cooley Dam, as well as one on the building of the tallest bridge in the world. All projects hired engineers et. al. through outside sources. All were done under budget and ahead of schedule.

 

Look at the history of privatization at the state level, here in Texas. With few exceptions, it has been unmitigated failure. In some cases, it has been dumped, with the state quietly rehiring laid off employees and taking over services again. Perry, Craddick, and company trumpet privatization, because it is the mantra of some of their largest ultra-conservative supporters, people like James Leininger, the bankroller of the far-right in Texas, a charter school fanatic, and an advocate of slashing state services and state employees, and replaced them with "private enterprise." Besides being a nutcase, his ideas simply haven't worked. That doesn't stop the politicians on his payroll from pushing his agenda, however.



D&D. Impeach Bush and Cheney.

 

Here in Mass, our toll road the Mass Turnpike continues to keep toll takers on the payroll at 60k+ a year, when we already have the electronic toll system in place. We could have saved a lot of money and moved more traffic with an all electronic toll system, but no we need to keep these hacks on the job so they can collect their fat pay and pension. You think a privately operated system can't do better than this?

 

Tangible examples please.

 

tyc


link

The firing revealed a blind spot in the state's system of background checks for juvenile justice employees: Private companies charged with running a handful of facilities don't always check the juvenile records of prospective employees, state officials said.

 

I remember starting a thread about that American Society of Civil Engineers report card two years ago only to see replies that they can be considered a lobbying group that's only interested in wanting more money....

We need more collapses and more deaths before our lumbering government does anything. Not that it's entirely the politicians fault. They like causes to champion, and keeping up the status quo won't get you elected. Failure, like the Big Dig, is career suicide and is remembered as a lesson of big government waste for the public. For the politicians, it's a lesson not to stick your next out.

I think gasoline taxes are a problem. Like I mentioned in that old thread, one work around is to tax trucks by the axel instead of using gas taxes to pay off the highways. Trucks, while essential to the transportation industry, are getting subsidized for tearing up our interstate highways.

The sad part is that our entire infrastructure on the state of disrepair, ports, highways, levees, communication (not that bad, but very patchy), energy transmission, you name it.

I wish I could say the bright side would be that if its entirely broken, we could just start anew, but bureaucracy makes it more likely that it's merely a triage system of patchworks that causes subsequent repairs to become even more expensive as population and consumption demands grows along with our economy.

It's not like we have the money to spend on it anyways....

 

Wow, talk about a disconnect:

And who was the contractor ultimately responsible for the big dig's cost overruns? Bechtel, which, along with KBR, is one of the doyennes of the right wing privatization gravy train. Not sure why you didn't know that.

 

I've given examples here before, Trader_J. If you are actually interested, not that you are, do a search.


D&D. Impeach Bush and Cheney.

 

That's what I am meant by incompetent local government. This is not privatization, this is handing government budget money to contractors with favorable connections.

 

Wow, you can't even name one. You have no authority on the topic.

 

You just answered your own question.

 

What question is that?

 

You know what, I don't blame the feds for one bridge collapsing. It's one bridge afterall. And it was being repaired! Not just in the right way. It seems that part of the problem is that no one really knows how to manage our aging infrastructure.

Steam pipes, levees, bridges, buildings, power grids. It all went up so fast.

I think there's only so much that can be done at reasonable cost, and that some risk has to be taken, the money just isn't there to eliminate all of it. Clearly we learn from these incidents. But now we know that better inspections may be required.

While I think Bush mismanaged New Orleans and FEMA terribly, I don't think he's complicit here...and likely this would have happened on anyone's watch.

 

The repairs weren't structural. They were resurfacing the roadway.

 

privatization IS handing contracts out to private firms. Building roads and bridges is not really a good example, it's about as privatized as any ostensibly government function can get.

 

While the blame doesn't solely rest on the Fed. government the Fed isn't blameless. For one 35W isn't a state highway but a Federal highway. So much of the funding for it is meant to come from the Fed.. As weslinder noted for better or worse a lot of the funds including matching funds for highway and bridge maintenance comes from the Fed..

I'm not ruling it out but there have been many contracts that have been handled privately that haven't turned out that well. COnsider why Texas has put a moratorium on turning over road construction and maintanence to private interests.

 

That's not real privatization, the project is still being managed by the government.

Real privatization would be for the toll road to be built and managed by a private company. When its expense needs to be covered by income, you will have less waste, no more 60k a year toll takers, no more cost overrun after cost overruns.

 

This is the salient point - there is a financial incentive to build projects with matching federal funds thal.t local and state government cannot afford to maintain. More long term planning on maintenance with federal assistance.