I welcome President Obama’s plan to spend on domestic infrastructure to combat the recession to create jobs and pump $825 billion into the U.S. economy. But if the stimulus is to deliver real value, accountability will be key: Just how well will this money be spent? Allocating huge sums for building new road infrastructure, for example, will have the unwelcome consequence of adding to the problem of an already significantly underfunded road maintenance program.
Systemic underfunding for decades has left the road networks across North America, Europe and Australia in an extremely poor and often unsafe state, with the resulting congestion creating significant economic cost in lost productivity. Adding new road infrastructure without addressing the maintenance problem will simply add to this funding gap, estimated at over $1 trillion in the U.S. alone.