Beneath American communities are mazes of pipes, wires, and fibers. This leads to costly problems:
According to Common Ground, such incidents cost the US about $83.2 billion per year, roughly as much as we invest in public transit annually nationwide. But the actual financial toll may be even higher, because every time a crew stumbles across a mislabeled power line or a gas pipe everyone else forgot about, it can delay construction for months on end. As Magruder Lyle put it, “if they get out there and they find something that they’re not supposed to, you have to go back and reengineer the whole project.”
This is a large number. But it makes sense when you consider all that is required for daily life in American cities. More and more layers keep getting added below cities to keep activity going. And it gets more and more complicated to address the built environment with all of this set underground.
While the rest of the article goes on to describe a possible solution – accessible underground tunnels or corridors that organize the infrastructure – it is always interesting at what point major infrastructure changes can take place. This raises several questions:
- Is the $83 billion figure widely known? If so, how do people respond? If not, would it help prompt action?
- If there was a collective will to act and bring organization to the underground maze infrastructure, who could make it happen?
- What would it cost in terms of money and time to make underground more accessible and better for the future?
The idea presented in the article is that intervening now to clean up this mess would make it much easier for projects in the future. But the short-term costs could be high; limited roadways, lots of construction, the use of resources. Infrastructure should be considered with a long view in mind but who keeps this long view in mind and will act on it?
