Making Infrastructure More Efficient
“Today, we proved that democracy can still work,” President Joe Biden touted at the White House this August after the Senate’s bipartisan 69-30 Senate vote in favor of the first part of his infrastructure plan. Flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden relished his victory: after many years of “infrastructure weeks,” as infrastructure pushes have derisively been dubbed by Washington insiders, the seemingly endless bipartisan back-and-forth ended. $1 trillion in infrastructure spending became probable.
Biden’s victory was short-lived. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban five days later shifted the news cycle from the President’s achievement to the disaster. Infrastructure has been sidelined from headlines that are now focused on abortion, mask mandates, and Facebook. Infrastructure may no longer be the focus of the country, but it is still important. With $550 billion potentially scheduled in new spending over the next five years, it is imperative to understand the apparent contradiction between infrastructure and efficiency in the United States.
When the first part of its track was finished in 2017, New York’s Second Avenue Subway was crowned the most expensive rail laid in history by mile. The cost was around $4.5 billion total. Paris is completing a comparable project for one-sixth the price. Subways and light rail lines are not the only things that cost more in the United States. In rural areas of the United States, the cost to build one mile of a two-lane undivided road is between $2 million and $3 million dollars. In Europe, accounting for currency and distance conversions, the cost to build one mile of road is between $1.15 million and $1.5 million.
Infrastructure did not always come at such a cost. Between 1960—four years after the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956—and 1980, the cost for one mile of highway increased three fold when adjusted for inflation. In just 20 years, costs skyrocketed. The reason is not unions nor higher worker pay. Rather, it was the passage and weaponization of laws meant to protect the environment and offer people a larger say in their government that has clogged infrastructure projects. One bill in particular has caused the most damage: The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, or NEPA.
NEPA works as follows: a federal agency is required to review the impact that their project—be it a road, bridge, or building—may have on the local community, the health of that community, and its environment. NEPA also requires the community to look into possible alternatives. At its core, NEPA is structured to involve the affected community. After an impact report is published, the public is given 45 days to comment on the report and analyze how it will impact their surroundings. The problem? Towns use NEPA to stall infrastructure projects. This inevitably makes infrastructure more expensive. The increased expense is because of the delays caused by NEPA and other environmental review processes, especially in higher income neighborhoods.
For example, the Charlottesville Bypass was originally proposed in 1979 in Charlottesville, VA. The project was designed to create a road that met the needs of the enormous growth Charlottesville had seen since the completion of US-29 in 1972. The congestion in Charlottesville caused a short four mile stretch of US-29 to take between twenty and thirty minutes to cross. The 6.2 mile long, $120 million bypass would have been true to its name and built to bypass the commercial region of US-29 where traffic slowed. By 2002—23 years after its proposal—the bypass was finally seriously considered. By 2014—12 years after this consideration and 35 years after its initial proposal—NEPA, or more specifically, the lawsuits involved in the bypass because of NEPA, killed it. A supplemental environmental impact statement was required for the bypass to continue. This was despite all previous findings over 35 years that there would be no significant impact on the environment. The project was mired in litigation and eventually the opposition to the project became too costly and time-consuming to justify a fight. Instead, US Route 29 was expanded and the $230 million that was supposed to be used for the bypass was used to increase the efficiency of the existing parts of U.S. 29.
Regardless of whether the use of NEPA was to prevent real environmental impacts on Charlottesville or the value of properties in Charlottesville, 35 years were lost in the process. That was 35 years of people sitting in traffic, wasting gas and money. Since funding for the Charlottesville bypass was transferred to improvements of U.S. 29 around that area, the improvements have saved drivers an estimated $12,500 a day because people do not spend as much time sitting in traffic. The bypass likely would have saved even more. Transferring the funding to improvements for the existing portions of U.S. 29 was a sensible alternative. However, it should not have taken 35 years.
H.R. 3684, the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed this August, contains a section concerned with streamlining the efficiency of NEPA by shortening the time periods for review and limiting the amount of review communities have on infrastructure. Within a three year period of construction, NEPA used to have no time limit for complaints to be made. The Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that must be completed once a complaint is submitted takes an average of 4.5 years on top of that three year period to complete. Infrastructure can be stalled even if there is no evidence that it should be.
The infrastructure bill confronts some of these issues. Now, the NEPA review process must be completed within two years and an issuance of a Record of Decision must be made for a project within 90 days of the EIS. While this is not a complete overhaul, these changes will serve to make NEPA more efficient while protecting the voice of the people. The changes are still somewhat mild, but they have largely gone uncovered in the media. A lot of the time, NEPA and lawsuits are weaponized by homeowners to protect property value rather than the environment. In 2010, a person’s home on average accounted for 62% of their total assets. It follows that many would therefore seek to protect the value of their property. However, this protection is also a major reason for the slow speed and high cost of infrastructure. For infrastructure to become less expensive, one of two things must happen: either people must stop using NEPA as a means of halting infrastructure projects or NEPA has to be reformed.
As more money is directed towards infrastructure in the near-future, the United States should work to determine how that money can be used most efficiently. If NEPA is used as a device for obstruction, then the law must be reformed. NEPA at its best was used to protect majority-Black neighborhoods after highways tore through them in the 1950s and 1960s. However, efficiency and rewriting the law so that obstruction of projects is more difficult would certainly not strip away these protections. European countries are able to protect their environment and their people with negligible impact on the efficiency of their infrastructure projects. Efficiency is not directly in opposition to environmental and community protection. However, the law is written as if there must be a choice between protection and efficiency. The United States must determine that this is not the case.