As we travel home today, we should take the opportunity to look around and notice where our transit system falls short because the examples are legion. This shortcoming is obvious to any Princeton students whose paths home today take them through the city that never sleeps. No major public infrastructure projects have been completed in New York City in several decades, and practically none have been completed in the greater New York area, either. It's not just a lack of new construction but a startling lack of maintenance. The Tappan Zee Bridge, which I'll drive over to get home today, is now see-through: There are holes in the deck, and one can often see the Hudson River through the roadway. That is disgraceful, and I'm sure other students who have to make a trip through Penn Station can tell similar stories of neglect.
These facts of life aren't limited to New York, of course - last year's bridge collapse in Minnesota makes that clear and, as a Letter to the Editor in today's paper suggests, Princeton's decrepit upperclassmen dorms show that our campus has the same issues - but all Princeton students can observe them in our nearest metropolitan neighbor. I'm not going to go all Fareed Zakaria or Thomas Friedman and suggest that this signals the imminent demise of America as a great power, but it's certainly troubling. To deal with this problem, the Obama administration should make every effort to follow through on its commitment to invest in a public works program.
Any massive, new construction programs face two huge obstacles. The first is the tendency of big projects to be delayed indefinitely and pushed further and further into the future. New York has been trying to comprehensively rebuild Penn Station and create a new station across the street for at least a decade with no real signs of progress. At Princeton, meanwhile, it took a decade to go from the decision to consider adding four-year residential colleges to the completion of Whitman.
Obviously, a lot of planning is required when dealing with large projects, while actually building something takes a long time. But there is no reason that an expedited timeline should be impossible. Right now, the process is so drawn out that projects proposed during boom times can't get off the ground before the next downturn in the business cycle renders them untenable. The process then restarts once the economy recovers. If President-elect Barack Obama wants his infrastructure plans to be successful, he'll have to ensure that the approval process allows for a quick start to construction.
The other major problem is cost: Buildings and bridges are expensive. New York has determined that it has to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge, but a modern replacement would cost $16 billion and if built will almost certainly end up costing far more than that. Princeton, meanwhile, is being forced to suspend some planned construction because of the economic downturn.
One of the biggest cost centers for construction is labor, particularly for government projects, for which the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act requires that all workers be paid the local "prevailing wage," i.e. the union wage. The point of this law is to increase the cost of construction projects. If Obama is serious about rebuilding as much of our infrastructure as possible, he'll have to hold down costs everywhere. Though repealing Davis-Bacon would infuriate union members who worked for his election campaign, it would go a long way toward making his infrastructure program more affordable.
Obama's infrastructure program is being touted as a short-term solution to the current crisis, a means to spend our way out of recession. Regardless of whether the plan would succeed in preventing a new Great Depression, it is a worthwhile goal that will pay dividends for years to come.
Barry Caro is a history major from White Plains, N.Y., and can be reached at bcaro@princeton.edu.
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