We Spend Billions, and All We Get Is a B?

The American Society of Civil Engineers reminds me of those college professors whose standing policy is never to give any student an A. No matter how diligent or resourceful you are, you must be doing something wrong, right?

On the other hand, there are those profs who automatically pass you as long as you show up for class, or who grade on a curve. “Wow, I barely studied and I still got a B+!”

But I digress …

The ASCE on March 1 awarded U.S. freight and passenger railroads the highest grade of its most recent Infrastructure Report Card. It’s not an A, or even an A–. It’s a B, which stands for “better than a C.” A grade of C is mediocre—and remember, the mediocre are always at their best.

I suppose we did reasonably well, considering that the overall ASCE U.S. infrastructure grade was a C–, which translates to “crappy.” Our friends in the pavement business rated a D, which stands for “dilapidated.” Must be all of those potholes, which people like me who drive high-performance cars sporting 19-inch alloy wheels shod with 245/40R19 low-profile tires dread.

Either that, or it’s all of those tractor-trailers pounding the crap out of our government-funded highways without paying their fare share. Oh yeah, let’s make ’em longer and heavier and autonomous, rolling like high-speed U.S. Army M1A2 Abrams tanks in Elon Musk-inspired platoons, while we’re at it!

ASCE cited “sustained private investment by freight railroads” as the primary reason for our grade B condition. In the 40 years since partial deregulation under the Staggers Rail Act (1980 to 2020), privately owned U.S. freight railroads invested nearly $0.74 trillion (sounds more impressive than $740 billion, right?), averaging approximately $25 billion per year over the past five years, on capital expenditures and maintenance expenses, most of it related to right-of-way, bridges, tunnels and other infrastructure.

Sounds like you freight rail civil engineering types deserve an A+, and that’s not being graded on a superelevated curve!

So how do we rate a B? What’s dragging us down to not much better than mediocre? 

ASCE’s scorecard noted that “despite freight and passenger rail being part of an integrated system, there remain stark differences in the challenges faced by the two rail categories.” For example, while some of Amtrak’s operations are hosted on well-maintained, privately funded freight rail infrastructure, America’s Railroad has a $45.2 billion state-of-good-repair backlog on the Northeast Corridor, which most people who live outside the Northeast either don’t understand or outright detest. 

ASCE called for “significant, overdue investment in passenger rail infrastructure, particularly in high-population centers.” So, I suppose that if such investments were made, our industry might rate a grade of at least an A–?

Want better highways? Transition the Highway Trust Fund into a user-pay system based on vehicle-miles traveled instead of on fuel tax. That’s an AAR recommendation that deserves an A+.