Why Is The United States Working To Become An Embarrassing Backwater*

When I was in Copenhagen for the COP15 meeting, I marveled at the trains. Copenhagen built the first driverless, fully automated metro system in the world. It's clean and comfortable, and if you sit in the front car, you can see the tracks ahead through the helpfully large window that takes up much of the front wall. The regional trains are simply, but appealingly, decorated, very modern and well-maintained.

Taking the train through the Northeast corridor in daylight, I also can't help but see the many abandoned buildings. My husband Chris jokes that they're the US' city ruins, which is funny considering that neither the country nor the buildings in question have been around all that long. Or maybe not so funny. I didn't see any ruins out the train windows in Copenhagen, and the only ones I saw in Ireland a couple years ago were genuinely ancient.

Because I bought my plane tickets at the last minute and ended up with multiple layovers, I also ended up seeing not only the airport in Copenhagen, but Paris' Charles De Gaulle, Amsterdam, Milan and Zurich. (If I'd gotten to spend a few days in all the places whose airports I visited, that would have been a very fine vacation.)

Granted, I was unthrilled with the Zurich airport, which felt like a mausoleum to the bank from hell, and the food choices in Milan were lousy. But the rest? Wow. It's nice to be in a built environment where you can believe that the designers gave a damn about the building's appeal to the crowds of people who were going to be herded through it.

It somehow made me feel more respected as a human being that such nice transit facilities had been made as available to me as they were to anyone else, especially the light rail, which of course is much more accessible to the average person than an airport. As recent experiments in 'broken windows' theory of law enforcement indicate, that subjective feeling may be a bigger deal than it may sound like at first - crime rates have been proved to respond positively to cleaner, more orderly surroundings. Nicer surroundings make most people not only feel better, but behave better.

I also discovered that I got better cell and data service in a Copenhagen metro station that's not only below street level, but below the underground regional rail tunnel, than I do in my own apartment in the US, which is situated in one of AT&T's highest coverage zones. Charming.

These are tiny examples, and I travel outside the country very little, but they square with what the well-traveled Thomas Friedman has found. They match with what infrastructure policy experts are saying about the national security threat our crumbling bridges and water facilities pose.

To combat the perverse incentives that have doomed our transit, utilities and communications services to a steady death spiral, we really do need a national infrastructure bank, as Charles Phillips, Laura Tyson and Robert Wolf recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, like the one proposed in President Obama's 2010 budget:

Our nation's investment in its physical infrastructure is far below what is necessary to meet its needs. Infrastructure spending in real dollars is about the same now as it was in 1968 when the economy was a third smaller. No wonder the American Society of Civil Engineer gave America's infrastructure a failing grade of D in its 2009 report.

Twenty-six percent of the nation's bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, and 188 cities have "brownfield" hazardous waste sites awaiting clean up and redevelopment, according to the engineering society. State and local governments account for about 75% of infrastructure spending, and most are reeling from budgetary shortfalls. In addition, the contraction of monoline insurers (specialized insurers that guarantee repayment of bonds) has made it much more difficult to issue infrastructure bonds. This has caused a growing backlog of economically justifiable projects that cannot be financed. ...

A national infrastructure bank could get tucked into a jobs bill, one that really needs to pass soon so funds can be included in 2010 planning for the construction season, considering that Congress is likely to dawdle on transportation reauthorization funding.

The sooner the country gets started, the sooner people can get back to work. Also, the sooner

The US is a long way from Haiti's level of infrastructure collapse (or simple absence), but many commentators have been nervously eyeing the way Haiti's fragile transportation and communication systems have been completely overwhelmed and calling the failure of New Orleans' levees to mind.

And higher-magnitude disasters are sure to be on their way. As climate scientists converge on baseline expectations of a three foot global sea level rise this century, maybe more, civil engineers and city planners need to be given the tools to make their regions disaster-resistant. Because even though it's at sea level and has a lot of waterfront property, at present, I have more faith in the Danish government's ability to protect Copenhagen from disaster than I do in the US government's ability to protect even high-value military and commercial port cities like New Orleans, LA, Norfolk, VA, or San Diego, CA.

In addition to the benefits to commerce, prestige and lowered crime, it's worth remembering that the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Southern California (about 7.0 on the Richter scale) hit a very densely populated region but killed only 63 people. Haiti's quake is likely to have killed many tens of thousands (Have you donated yet, btw?) and the difference, as with the magnitude 6.6 quake that leveled the Iranian city of Bam and killed over 26,000, is mainly in the quality of the built environment.

There's no reason to either pretend that our bridges and roads are eternal, or to throw our hands up and accept it as unresolvable. Yes, all physical objects will degrade, but what we built once, we can build again, and probably better if we learned some lessons since the first time around. Though if a society were resign itself to the dismal and unnecessary end of letting everything go to hell, understand that it's also a resignation to increasing poverty, exposure to the elements and greater risks to property and life.

Though for a country that's often criticized as overly proud, the United States has really let itself go on this front, with no especially good excuse. What a pointless, stupid fate for such a wealthy and capable society to walk blithely towards.

* Because I just couldn't let it go.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future