There’s Another Way to Pay for Infrastructure Projects
Rather than raising taxes, we can finance bridge and road improvements by packaging and selling data on their usage.
Construction on the northern portion of U.S. 181 leading to the Corpus Christi Harbor Bridge in Texas.
Photographer: Eddie Seal/BloombergIt's no secret that the roads, bridges, water and sewer systems that have shaped how our communities developed over the last century are, in too many cases, operating on borrowed time. Infrastructure is — after all — the collective of services that allows a society to function.
In its recently released infrastructure report card, the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE) counted more than 45,000 of the nation’s bridges as structurally deficient. Despite the poor condition of these overpasses, they carry 178 million trips every day. While our drinking water system has improved in the past few years, there's still a water main break every two minutes somewhere along its 2.2 million miles of pipes. Those are just two examples of the many U.S. infrastructure services that need to be fixed and future-proofed—and urgently.