Infrastructure: Highways

Today’s Albuquerque journal had a lovely photo of a couple of college guys evaluating the pavement on N.M. 36 near Fence Lake. In fact, the story said this is the third summer students have traveled the state highways checking out things. The students are paid, starting at $12.50/hour plus expenses for lodging and meals.
Two things may be happening here, neither good. First the jobs may be make-work. Well, OK, that happens. As a student, before computers stepped in, I spent a month putting 10,000 pins into a map at the Land Office to locate oil wells.
The second possibility is that the Department of Transportation really needs the information. In other words, DOT has no other system of tracking the condition of our 27,000 miles of state highways.
I’m reminded of when the fire department came to my son’s Cub Scout meeting maybe 17 years ago. Somebody asked what would happen if there was a fire in the meeting place. The fireman said the first task would be to hook the hose into the fire hydrant in the next block because the hydrant nearest the building didn’t work. Never in my wildest dreams about infrastructure management would I have thought that a fire hydrant would not work. Of course, I also don't have dreams of any sort about infrastructure management.
I also figured DOT knew the condition of the state’s roads. Silly me.
While amazing on its face, this ignorance may be background for one item on the expanding agenda for the coming special session of the legislature—paying for 13 “badly needed” rural bridge and highway construction projects. Why only 13?
I was introduced to the state’s highway project list in March. The list is, dare I say it, “gripping.” And long. One metro Albuquerque project is to fix roads in Willard. (Yes, Willard is in the metro.) There are the sidewalk improvements in Lovington and Gonzales Road in Questa.
The recently released 2008 Government Performance Project of The Pew Center on the States ranks New Mexico's road infrastructure a D plus.
Courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, here is what infrastructure means. “A sound infrastructure supports economic growth and activity; increases in productivity are in turn linked to higher living standards, rising levels of employment and incomes, and lower prices for goods and services. Infrastructure also supports business investment and innovation and allows customers and products to reach each other ore easily; better roads foster faster and more efficient delivery of goods.”
The comment is from an Atlanta Fed magazine, “Econ South.” Find it at http://www.frbatlanta.org. The current issue is an infrastructure special.