The consensus concerns those projects--new highways, runways, power plants--that produce significant region-wide benefits but impose high localized costs. In the great post-World War II infrastructure building boom, such impacts were widely accepted as the cost of progress. By the mid- to late 1960s, however, such policies were under widespread attack from residents of communities greatly harmed by new projects. Not long after, America's fledgling environmental movement began making the case that proposals such as the Storm King power plant on the Hudson River or an airport in the Everglades were unacceptably harmful to the natural environment.
The American political system responded to those ground-swells of concern. By the early 1970s, most major projects faced huge new sets of procedural and legal obstacles designed not only to ensure that the most harmful projects did not proceed but also that controversial ones could be tied up indefinitely in procedural wrangling.
In the wake of that approach, a new form of project began to appear-- one that provided substantial benefits without creating serious localized problems. Boston's Central Artery-Tunnel proj-ect, for example, provides substantial new highway capacity to downtown Boston, but it does so without taking any homes: It is being built underground. Similarly, I-90 outside Seattle crosses Mercer Island in a tunnel covered by parkland. However, since such impactless projects tend to be substantially more expensive than traditional projects, they are difficult to fund. Consequently, they have been relatively rare.
The other approach to the new reality was to find ways to make more efficient use of existing infrastructure. Airlines created new hub airports in underutilized facilities, such as airports in Pittsburgh and Charlotte. And there were attmepts to make more efficient use of existing power plant capacity--sometimes through investments in conservation rather than new generating capacity.
It's not clear, however, that either of these two approaches will provide the infrastructure America needs in the 21st century. Continued growth in airline traffic, for example, is overwhelming existing runway capacity, particularly since U.S. airports cannot or will not use pricing to allocate the scarce capacity they currently have. Similarly, continued growth in power consumption is testing the limits of conservation programs, while the continued growth in automobile travel is producing increased congestion, particularly on once-smooth-flowing suburban highways.
In the face of such forces, there is growing pressure to revisit the policies of constraint that make it so hard to build new projects. Airport and airline executives, with encouragement from the Bush administration, are pushing for ways to speed up approvals for new runways, and there is serious discussion about two controversial new airports: one south of Chicago and the other on the former Homestead Air Force base near both Miami and the Everglades.
At the same time, California's energy problems have already led many state and federal policy makers to press for relaxing limitations on the construction of new power plants and natural gas pipelines. New highways are being discussed not only on the fringe of many growing Sun Belt regions but also in cities, such as Los Angeles, where such talk has been virtually taboo.
These kinds of changes would fundamentally alter the balance of power between private interests--notably the businesses that benefit from the new capacity and the construction firms that build such projects-- and the many non-profit "public-interest" groups that have sprung up to defend and argue for pro-neighborhood and pro-environment policies.
There is much to suggest that the time is ripe for this policy change to take place. Citizens stuck in traffic, waiting at airports and, in California, sometimes left without power, may be supportive of efforts that make it easier to build new infrastructure. Private business interests seem to be increasingly powerful in the American political system. And with the White House, Congress and many governorships in Republican hands, those supporting changes that would make it easier to build new infrastructure seem likely to find a sympathetic ear among policy makers at the federal level.
Advocates of such a transformation, however, are by no means assured of success. When it took office, for example, the Reagan administration also tried to roll back much environmental regulation. For the most part, however, those efforts failed. Indeed, they reenergized the nation's environmental movement--a rebirth that spurred the passage of several stricter new federal environmental laws in the late 1980s and early '90s.
The question now is whether times have really changed.
