American Infrastructure: There's No Turning Back
Analyzing the maintenance crisis that faces American cities.
Part I: Public Transportation is a Ticking Time Bomb
Cliché meme, I know, but it really sets the tone well.
I am not a fan of chaos, and while I am receptive to starting confrontation when it is required, I really prefer to keep the peace. It relates back to a virtue of “stability” that I try to uphold. I have seen too much chaos throughout my life, and it all can be directly sourced back to my culture’s spiritual malaise and familial atomization. However, for those of you who are trying to fix the problem, and offer your own impenetrable systems that are supposed to fix every pet issue you are irked by; pet issues that all generally relate to a collective unconscious awareness that something ain’t right, families and communities are broken, job prospects are lost, the spiritual and cultural placements, gender-specific and class-specific, that gave the average person a sense of identity have disappeared. Yes, we are truly living in chaos.
For many people, though, pinpointing the many issues of familial atomization and spiritual malaise is a hard endeavor - it’s why you meet so many people who don’t even realize the reasons for their confusion and sadness are the outcome of such. What the average apolitical person working a menial job with an IQ somewhere in the 90s or early 100s might recognize, however, is just how dirty the streets are, how congested traffic is, how encumbered our cities have become, how expansive the squalor is, and especially how the efforts we’ve made in recent decades to remedy such problems seem to do nothing except make all of these problems worse. The roads are too congested, well build another lane! New lane is built, and now there’s too many people congesting the road up again! Build another! This has been a problem in my hometown of (Greater) Houston, which expands over 1,660 square miles of floodplains. To give some perspective of how giant that is, the entire nation of Luxembourg is 999 square miles, but the large difference is Houston has exploded in population since the mid-20th Century, both native and foreign. However, that trend seems to be slowing down quite a bit.
In Houston, the railway, which was supposed to be a giant system that connected the entire city, is relegated to mainly the central part of Houston where it mainly serves the massive, world-renowned medical district. For anyone who frequently uses public transportation in the city, and is honest with themselves about its quality, they will quickly becomes cynical at the poor state of the city’s infrastructure. The passenger trains are normally empty, and when they do have people in them, they are usually homeless. In addition to this, the average Houstonian with a good enough memory will recall how Beltway 8, harboring the first of what would be many tollways and lanes, was supposed to be hastily paid for by the fares, and then gotten rid of. Well, decades have passed, and not only is there still a toll, but the Westpark, Katy, and Grand tollways can be added to that list.
The main public transportation vehicle is city buses. As you can probably guess, the extremely congested city, that spans the size of a small principality, where the roads have become potholed and poorly repaired, it isn’t very efficient. Not only that, but public transportation in general gets most of its funding from taxation, and not fares. I don’t know if you are a math genius, or anything, but that is what we call a deficit. The more money that has to be spent on a transportation system that, especially in Texas as we take in more West Coast and economic migrants, more will have to be put into maintaining roads, maintaining buses that, as someone who took the bus everyday for two years in Houston, break down on the regular. Why don’t we just do what this overpaid genius at the New York Times said, and just give public transit more money! Well, like I said - deficit. If you are getting less and less taxes, more and more progressive legislation that allows for people to legally hop turnstiles and not pay their fares, the more public transit will be overrun by people taking advantage, the more repair that will be needed, and the less money coming in that takes care of the cost. Soon, cities will have to start issuing more municipal bonds that are an existential crisis in and of themselves, so instead, they will start taxing their jolly rich liberals eager to throw more money into the sunken cost fallacy that is the modern American city.
Part II: Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
From the Texas Comptroller website:
Texas has about 53,000 bridges, more than any other state. Of these, the Federal Highway Administration rated nearly 19 percent as either "structurally deficient" or "functionally obsolete" in 2015. A bridge is considered structurally deficient if any of its major components are significantly deteriorated. Functionally obsolete bridges no longer meet current highway design standards, often because of narrow lanes, inadequate clearances or poor alignment.
In one of my all-time favorite films, Durak, a Russian plumber is called to an emergency job at a public tenement where nothing but welfare recipients and the lowest of dregs live at. There, he discovers not a simple pipe burst. he discovers an integral structural deficiency that needs immediate attention. He spends the entire night going across his town, discovering the machinations of corrupt Russian government, and the omnipresent feeling of how much of Russia’s public infrastructure is shotty, outdated, and Soviet, but no one cares to do anything about it.
What’s this film really gets at is an issue the entirety of the world, developed, developing, and undeveloped, are going to face in coming years and decades as the sunken cost of infrastructure already established cannot be maintained by economies that are irreparably low-yielding. Russia, itself, has had stagnant GDP since the early 2010s. Now take the monolith that is the average major American city, with all of its crime, racial division, and disrepair, and watch it collapse as lack of funding becomes more and more of a problem. I would guess that regardless of Democrat or Republican, many states and cities will not be able to just issue bonds to pay for a deficit that widens day after day.
With less and less people in many major cities, we face another issue. LA, and New York City are shining examples of giant megacities that will soon look like Chicago, with their taxpayers all moving to the already-bloated Houston, DFW, Austin, Tampa, Atlanta, and Nashville:
The population increases for LA and NYC respectively were both 2.8% and 7.7%, from 2010 to 2020.
Houston it was 9.9%. DFW it was 18.8%. Austin it was 21.7%. Tampa it was 14.7%. Atlanta it was 18.7%. Nashville it was 14.7%.
There is a clear move from the already-decrepit, or cities that are starting to become decrepit, from the West Coast and New England to Southern cities, where the already pitiful infrastructure, and foolish strip mall expansion outward has doomed many of these cities to being endless urban prairies of crime, constantly breaking-down roads, electric grids that are outdated and can’t meet the demand, water shortages from likely droughts, and the numerous natural disasters Southern cities face with hurricanes and flooding that create a massive existential threat at least every decade.
Meanwhile, cities like NYC face the issues of not overuse, but neglect. Same issues we will face the more population flattens out, and cities meant for millions, continue to be left more and more idle and less invested in by populations that are poorer and more sparse. 50% of sewage pollution made it unsafe to touch the water somewhere in New York City.
The issue of neglect is omnipresent, however. Like the statistics on Texas’ bridges, the simple anecdotal evidence of not just me, as someone who drives around this state and its major cities on the regular, but just the average Texan, is the roads are not drivable. Not just major cities, but the highways themselves. For anyone who has ever driven on I-10 going to San Antonio from Houston, about the last hour as you are approaching San Antonio, the road becomes immensely rough. If you are sensitive to bumps and potholes like I am, especially since I drive a little CUV, you become quickly aware that this is not acceptable, nor is this well-maintained. You think to yourself, “Wow, isn’t this supposed to be the most popular state, right now? With one of the best standards and costs of living? With some of the richest people?” It makes one wonder why with how litigious America is that someone hasn’t filed a class action lawsuit against the federal government or state of Texas for the level of wear and tear these low quality roads do on cars.
Texas’ transportation needs are still mounting. As our roads and highways continue to age, they’ll reach a point at which routine paving and maintenance are not enough to keep pavement surfaces in good condition.
In the past, various ideas proposed to increase road funding have included raising the gasoline tax or indexing it for inflation; increasing vehicle registration fees; building more toll roads; seeking local funding through transportation reinvestment zones; and creating public-private sector partnerships for road construction and improvements.
The average American faces a massive catch 22. Either you sink more money into a problem that shouldn’t be fixed due to a dying economy (can’t admit that), or you just pull our hands away and let things peter off as we start to accept the very short-term infrastructure we developed from the 1940s onward isn’t something that was even feasible to maintain. Either way, it’s going to start looking a lot more like the way we planned out cities was a cheap patchwork answer to, “Well, we’ve got to do something with all of this money! Build a giant interstate so I can build giant skyscrapers nyeh!” (and also the enormous benefit a military has at quelling any possible incivility and invasion if it has an extremely well-connected interstate highway system that connects its entire nation well, a lot of it. I’d argue, it isn’t quite as easy as a mid-20th Century general may have idealistically thought it’d be. I bet Romans were just as naïve.)
Part III: Get Out of the Cities
I’m sure there were plenty of Romans who felt the same way, after the empire had already reached its height, and as their native population hit its limits, the invasive hordes took advantage, plundering every bit of Rome’s bloated leviathan as possible, who looked upon the fall as some transitory occasion. I’m sure they thought it was being blown out of proportion by doomsayers. They just didn’t have much to compare their obvious fall to, nor could an empire so vast and so powerful really accept it was on the downslope.
It doesn’t take a genius to see the peak we have reached with high-trust and high-wealth. The wealth ran out, and so with that goes the trust. This is what ties it all back to the spiritual and the moral. Metropolises that were so full of opportunity, hustle, and bustle, like places like New York City flowed with in the 1920s, are not coming back. If this were any time before the industrial age, they would be seen for what they are - land conquered by corrupt officials, as well as crime-savvy bandits, and left to rot. Those foolish enough to stick around are doomed to the figurative and literal rape they will face on their own people, and on their finances and infrastructure.
Like I mentioned in one of my first blogposts, it is a feedback loop that will only continue to get faster and faster. The more the highly trustworthy, taxpaying tradesmen and entrepreneurs pack up and leave, the higher the taxes have to become to take care of the exponentially decaying infrastructure. It becomes an issue where every time a fire is extinguished, two more start up.
The plundering of places like San Francisco and Chicago aren’t outcomes of just legislation, but specifically a culture and economy in decay. This would not happen in a rich, trustworthy society. This is simply the new precedent that has been set, and will spread to most modern cities, especially as this legislation is inevitably passed in places like Austin. It is only a matter of time before their hand is forced, especially in places where the ethnic diversity is so great that every new block there is a completely different language being spoken, culture being lived, and religion being practiced. I’ve seen it in Houston - nothing keeps that city together other than the passable flow of money that the oil and finance industry has helped sustain; industries that are not somehow impenetrable to a slowing global economy. As a matter of fact, they are especially vulnerable.
A giant spending bill won’t fix anything, rather it will just exacerbate the problem of there being too much to maintain. We need to do what the Chinese are doing, and dial down the expansion, but that’s the problem - America only exists with the Faustian Man. Once he is dead, America can no longer continue the charade that it is the wealth-bringer, the great equalizer, the super-intelligent inventor, the wise king. What is neat now, at least, with the way reality has become so accelerationist and chaotic, is we are really starting to see the death throes, the politicians become less careful, the CEOs become more cucked, but even better, the good people are coming out of the woodwork, caring less about their image, and standing up against a proliferating evil that must be pointed out and pushed back against. In this case, the evil of decay must be remedied with community construction, and a rejection of the failures of modernity to ever-expand into the wild blue yonder.
It’s going to get more interesting as the degenerative aspects of decay start to overpower the old regime’s ability to sweep it under the rug.
God bless, and be vigilant.
“Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.”
St. Augustine