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How To Save Billions On Infrastructure

December 12th, 2016   Author: Doug Thaler

Save Billions On Infrastructure

“Infrastructure” the buzz word of the day. Both presidential candidates used infrastructure as talking points to further their campaigns. Trump vowing to increase infrastructure spending from the $300+/- billion passed by the Obama administration to $1 trillion dollars. That’s a hard number to get even your calculator to comprehend. Our infrastructure is over 70 years old, our bridges are crumbling our roads full of potholes with hour long travel backups, ports too small for today’s container ships. Roads are overcrowded and our railway systems in dire need of upgrading. President elect Trumps transportation initiative will pour billions into upgrading our roads and railways and add new bridges…but what about the billions in existing transportation funding? With so much money already budgeted towards infrastructure why are our roadways and bridges in such a state of disrepair and what can we do about it?


Federal funds are set aside for the states, much of it is discretionary and states have discretion in diverting 25% of those funds into other projects. With the fund already in a shortfall status that does not help matters. In an article written by Michael Sargent;






Save Billions On Infrastructure




The full article, “A primer on federal surface transportation spending” can be found here

Why is transportation infrastructure important?

Transportation infrastructure is the lifeblood of a civilized society. The economy relies on a healthy transportation infrastructure in order to compete on a global basis as well as supporting a healthy economy at home.Transportation infrastructure relates to the efficient movement of people & goods which is essential for building a strong economy and improving the quality of life and continued


Save Billions On Infrastructure


prosperity for their citizens. Another words the quality and efficiency of a nations infrastructure can be directly correlated to the economic success of that country.


Being able to efficiently transport goods would mean lower costs allowing us to be more competitive with our international neighbors.


Many US Ports even today are not large enough to utilize the mammoth container ships that the renovated Panama canal is pushing through. Countries that can handle these ships, which are two to three times larger than the container ships that the USA can accommodate have a competitive advantage


Save Billions On Infrastructure


The ability to ship more goods at one time at a cheaper price is a huge advantage for both exports and imports over the USA. Our roads, clogged by increased residential development create traffic backups that cause our workforce to be late losing hundreds of thousands of productivity hours lost.


No one even considers the peripheral effects of having to wake up earlier to get to work at the same time. Less sleep more health issues and sick days create a cycle of lost productivity and opportunities. Delays for trucks mean that goods cannot get to market in a timely manner. Delays mean more gas, more man-hours increased costs and less profits. I look at my own situation when I first moved to Marlboro New Jersey during a housing boom. My initial commute to NYC was 50 min to the Lincoln Tunnel. Two years and a few thousand houses later my commute currently takes 1hr 15minutes to the tunnel and a bigger gap for the commute home. Getting through the tunnel can be 15min to another hour depending on delays.


So how do we fix the problem? Not only fix the issues but fix them within existing budgets while being able to utilize new transportation funding to build new railroads, highways and mass transit systems that will make our economy more efficient by a multiplier effect. It starts with setting up a mandate to utilize existing funding that is already paid out to the states who in turn contract infrastructure asset management companies to update the current 50 year old inspection methods to ensure that the best technology and tools are being utilized to inspect existing infrastructure assets. By inspecting properly and finding deterioration and issues as early as possible and curing those issues we can extend the service life of those assets for years.


Current technology is capable of examining a structures integrity and its underlying support systems and when repairs need to be made. This not only allows us to better budget infrastructure expenditures but create a safer infrastructure for the public. This can also prevent emergency replacements of deficient infrastructure assets that end up costing billions in what may have been avoided costs if proper preventative maintenance activities were performed.


In the event that you missed that comment we are currently using 50 year old manual inspection methods to inspect our bridges, roadways and dams. Yes these inspection methods predate the advent of the computer and are still in use today as the primary means of inspecting our infrastructure. During a bridge inspection we are still dragging a chain across a bridge deck vs using modern methods to record cracks in a bridge deck, delamination and void formations. By utilizing current technology we can graph deterioration over time and schedule repairs so issues do not become to costly or a danger to the public. We need to push for change on both the federal and state levels now.


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Infrastructure Preservation Corporation, a nondestructive testing and robotic engineering company specializing in updating 50 year old manual inspections with modern robotics. Focused on transportation infrastructure these inspections are more accurate, less subjective and offer qualitative data that help us extend the service life of critical infrastructure assets. To learn more go to www.infrastructurepc.com.


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