UPDATE 12/25/08: A number of tragic events in the past several years have exposed the multiple costs of continuing to neglect our deteriorating infrastructure: to human lives, to quality of life, to the economy, to the future health and competitive prospects of our country. President-elect Barack Obama is working with Congress to put together a New-Dealish economic stimulus package that could total $850 billion, with a big chunk of those funds dedicated to projects that will repair, rebuild, and upgrade the nation's infrastructure.

I support Obama's infrastructure initiative wholeheartedly, but with two cautionary notes. First, a general one: Don't shortchange long-range planning and restructuring in the short-term interest of creating jobs by giving top priority to projects that are "shovel-ready." American leaders recognize the need to alter how this country uses energy; they may be less clear that this need should inspire them to fundamentally rethink American land use patterns and reconsider which patterns the government should discourage and which it should support. (To give one obvious example, higher density settlements reduce the need for frequent long-distance travel and thereby facilitate more efficient mass transit.) Second, a specific one with far-reaching ramifications: Don't ignore the gross inefficiency of the American construction industry on which many of these infrastructural initiatives will depend. (Studies estimate that somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the total time spent on the average American construction site is wasted.) Use our New New Deal to push that problem-rife industry toward long-overdue restructuring, which should be no less dramatic--and enormously more economically significant--than the one that everyone recognizes the comparatively small and comparatively efficient auto industry needs. For a devastating diagnosis, Barry B. LePatner's Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry is a good place to start, and it must be a start, as this critical problem plaguing such a large percentage of our economy is not even on the public's or policymakers' radar screens.

Within fourteen days of each other, two rush-hour calamities: a bridge collapse and a steam-pipe explosion. In Minneapolis, a forty-year-old bridge along highway I-35W suddenly dropped sixty feet into the Mississippi River, killing at least five people and injuring approximately one hundred more. The federal government had deemed the bridge structurally deficient in 1990, which the Minnesota Department of Transportation acknowledged in separate reports issued in 2005, 2006, and 2007, after inspecting the bridge. In seventeen years, federal and state agencies repeatedly reported significant problems with the fallen bridge and yet no meaningful repairs were made. In midtown Manhattan, meanwhile, an eighty-three-year-old asbestos-wrapped steam pipe exploded, killing one person and injuring dozens more. That pipe is owned by the private utility company Con Edison, whose crews had inspected it earlier the same day and deemed it safe.

Headlines screeching news of these two horrifying events have replaced, temporarily, the usual newspaper rhythm of weekly incantations announcing this or that city's plans for adorning itself with a new stadium, public park, or luminescent museum--announcements that often serve to distract the public's attention from the silent scourge afflicting this country's viscera. One pipe explosion and one bridge collapse just might be enough to rouse the public to the news that America's metropolitan regions are in serious trouble. Bridges, utilities, and flood-prevention systems, whether publicly or privately owned, are grossly neglected. Suburbs are sprawling like unchecked chickweed. Cars are stuck in ever-mounting hours of traffic. Cities are bleeding people. School buildings are overpopulated and crumbling. Waters are polluted. Shipping ports are decrepit.

Typically, these matters are discussed piecemeal, as discrete problems beleaguering this or that city or suburb (Minneapolis, Manhattan) or this or that infrastructural element (bridges, utilities). Politicians, voters, and the professional stewards of our built environment--city planners, architects, landscape architects, urban designers, civil engineers--could let inertia run its course and continue to approach such problems, conceptually and politically, in this balkanized manner. If they do, the American media will continue to feast upon these tales of mismanagement and woe, and only marginal, localized improvements will occur. But these problems are not discrete or local. They are part of a larger single phenomenon: America's failure to manage the physical plant of its urban settlements, to maintain what it should while designing, funding, and building desperately needed new facilities.