7 infrastructure projects it's nuts to not start building immediately

7 infrastructure projects it's nuts to not start building immediately

As I've been writing repeatedly for my entire professional career, the U.S. is in a mild depression. It's been this way for six years now. Aside from the terrible effects of unnecessary mass unemployment, the second most infuriating aspect of this situation is the way we've behaved with respect to our national infrastructure. With construction unemployment very high, borrowing costs at historic lows, and materials cheap, we've been not just ignoring a chance for cheap new projects that would put people to work, but skimping on critical maintenance, leading to much more expensive catastrophic failures.

Luckily, world-best transit blogger Alon Levy is here with a set of utter no-brainer infrastructure projects — and not just the most famous ones, these are underrated projects that don't get much attention relative to their likely payoff. There are four in New York, two in Boston, and one in San Francisco (and one in Toronto, but we'll leave that to the Canadians). In a sensible country, these projects would be on the drawing board tomorrow.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.