Bob Herbert wrote today about the many ways that Obama is planning to create jobs with his economic plan.
In a radio address on Saturday, Mr. Obama described his plan as follows:
“It will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jump-start job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy.
“We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.”
The message is many years overdue. The hope is that it hasn’t come too late.
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Right now infrastructure projects go forward willy-nilly. They are often financed haphazardly and are subjected to the worst kinds of political influence.
Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut is sponsoring a bill that would create an infrastructure bank with a bipartisan board of directors and a chief executive to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
The board would streamline the process of reviewing and signing off on major infrastructure proposals. It would determine the value to the public of each project — and its environmental impact. It would provide federal investment capital for approved projects and use that money to leverage private investment.
Anyone living in Seattle and especially anyone who was working downtown or driving on the Alaskan Way viaduct during the Nisqually earthquake of 2001 knows that we need some serious infrastructure rebuilding as soon as possible. Here’s a photo of what I see every day I drive to work on the viaduct:
That’s the lower level of the viaduct heading south. During rush hour, it’s way more crowded than that.
And here’s a photo of what I’m thinking of every day I drive to work on the viaduct:
That’s San Francisco’s Cypress Street viaduct that collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Dozens of people in cars on the lower level were crushed to death. The death toll probably would have been in the hundreds had the earthquake not occurred during warm-ups for the World Series that was happening at the time, because fans had already traveled to the game or were watching it at home on television. Anyway, the Cyprus Street viaduct and the Alaskan Way viaduct were built about the same time using essentially the same design. Both bridges were built on fill, and the S.F. quake showed that a lot shaking results in catastrophic structural failure.
Seattle’s 2001 Nisqually quake was different than San Francisco’s. The earth shook more horizontally during the San Francisco quake and more vertically during the Seattle quake. I was on the eleventh floor of a concrete office building downtown when the Seattle quake hit, and I thought I was a goner. The quake lasted forty-five seconds. Ordinarily that doesn’t seem like a very long time, but it seemed like an eternity while I was bouncing up and down under my desk.
When the quake was over and I started walking around, I remember looking out a window towards the viaduct to see if it had collapsed. I was both surprised and relieved to see that It had not. I read recently that scientists think it would have collapsed had the quake lasted fifteen more seconds.
The point is that we do have hundreds of bridges in our country that are in serious need of repair or replacement, and I am all too familiar with one of them.
So, President Elect Obama and Senator Dodd, let this be a formal request for you to send some stimulus “economic recovery” dollars to Seattle so we can tear down our life-threatening viaduct. Seattleites have been arguing about what to do with it for over seven years. (Nothing that has anything to do with transportation happens quickly in Seattle.) We need someone from the outside to say, “Here’s a bunch of money. Tear that deathtrap down. NOW!”