We shouldn't wait until after a piece of infrastructure collapses to fix the cracks in the foundation. The public capital stock has been allowed to age much more than the residential and private stock:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/12/age_americas...
Re:Is Your Job an Endangered Species?
by yummyfajitas on Thursday February 17, 2011 @01:28PM
(#2232116)
Measuring age is not necessarily relevant - if a bridge has a lifetime of 50 years, but the average age is 23 years (up from 16), we have a long way to go before it becomes a problem. Your chart is interesting, but hardly conclusive.
This is a common meme, but I just don't see it. Where is our crumbling infrastructure? At least in my area, the infrastructure works fantastically.
We had one bridge collapse due to a design flaw, which was so surprising that it became national news. Now we need to replace every bridge, potentially introducing new design flaws in the process? Seems like a massive overreaction to me, probably on the same scale as our overreaction to 9/11.