You may recall that last year the U.S scored an abysmal D+ grade for its infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), but what can the government, industry leaders and stakeholders do about it?
Last month, a new report offered a six-point plan offering new ideas to regain America’s infrastructure leadership. Entitled “Making the Grade” (PDF), the report represents the consensus of many who attended the meeting “Executing a Sustainable Infrastructure Vision” convened by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) initially in 2012. The Making the Grade roundtable that followed in 2013 was comprised of experts from 45 companies representing the scope of the U.S. infrastructure industry—planning, engineering, construction, and technology—and their counterparts from local governments, professional organizations, think tanks, financial advisors, academic institutions, and others.
These include the American Public Works Association, ASCE, Autodesk, the City of Boston, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Skanska, and more.
Here’s what they recommend:
- Make Infrastructure leadership a presidential and cabinet priority to convey and support the vision, arbitrate competing interests, and remove obstacles to success
- Form U.S. infrastructure regions to integrated infrastructure agendas and efficiently allocate capital and natural resources
- Establish a national infrastructure bank to accelerate projects that can align with the visions goals, i.e., innovation, and prudent use of capital, modernize project delivery methods, and societal benefit, among others
- Sell opportunity bonds to raise more infrastructure capital to fulfill our generational obligation
- Create a national infrastructure index that clearly articulates our current state, ambition, and the relative contribution of proposed projects and programs to encourage long-term, sustainable ROI through transparency
- Engage the American people to build support for the importance of infrastructure policy
But that’s not it. The report goes on to outline substantive recommendations and workable solutions. The ASCE estimates that US$3.6 trillion must be invested by 2020 to make critically needed upgrades and expansions of national infrastructure -- and avoid trillions of dollars in lost business sales, exports, disposable income and GDP.
Take a look at the full report here, it’s a worthwhile read.
Images courtesy of Autodesk.
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