Niles may be the flour whisperer, but her voice rises as she describes the stress she’s had to deal with since then. It starts with the perishable products she’s trying to get back to her kitchen: “We’re getting fresh produce, fresh vegetables, raw protein, dry ice.” But suppliers won’t make deliveries to West Seattle any more, so it’s up to her to go out to sit in traffic jams, both coming and going, to procure the ingredients the business needs.
While she and some other West Seattle businesses had been granted restricted emergency passage across a smaller, lower bridge, city transportation officials have tinkered repeatedly with the timing and the access rules, introducing so many caveats that businesses find themselves mired not only in traffic jams, but also confusion.
“I don’t have 45-minutes to an hour to wait in traffic one-way – it’s incredibly cumbersome to businesses,” Nile says. “at the end of the day I’m almost running this business alone so I don’t have the wherewithal.”
The bridge closure also affects how her pot pies go out. Niles had been using Uber and Lyft drivers for her deliveries, but with the daunting traffic sometimes those drivers don’t even bother to show up.
Nile says she’s tried to hire help. “We’ve been trying to hire for months, but then [prospective hires] look at the commute….”
And so a plucky little business that makes delicious pot pies ends up being a story about a bridge that’s going to pot. Emergency stabilization of the bridge has been completed and another phase of repairs is slated before the bridge can be reopened. Earlier this summer the project received a federal grant of $11 million to help pay for the next round of repair work. At this point, city officials anticipate that the bridge will reopen next summer.
This, of course, is only one small business’s frustrating story about one deficient bridge. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), there are over 45,000 bridges across the nation that are considered structurally deficient and in dire need of rehabilitation or replacement. A recent estimate of what it would take to address this country’s backlog of bridge repair: $125 billion.
One of the most concrete measurements of the Biden administration’s campaign to Build Back Better will lie in the success or failure of his proposed infrastructure agenda, for it is the bridges, roads, railways, dams, tunnels, power grids, drinking-water and wastewater systems and more that provide the fundamental physical support of our society.
This past March, Biden put forward his American Jobs Plan. In addition to containing the more traditional elements of an infrastructure bill, Biden also folded in goals having to do with green energy, research and development, workforce support – and singling out workers in the frequently overlooked caregiving sector for special attention. The price tag: over $3 trillion.
This would be an unprecedented level of funding for infrastructure, but as shocking as that figure sounds, the ASCE assesses it would actually take double that amount to restore the nation’s aging infrastructure. For more than two decades, the ASCE has released a quadrennial Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, and although the 2021 iteration shows a slight improvement over the previous report, the overall infrastructure GPA of C- is hardly a glowing endorsement.
The 2021 Report Card identifies maintenance backlogs and chronic underinvestment as dire problems throughout the country and across most infrastructure sectors. This year, 11 of the 17 categories the ACSE evaluates were accorded a “D” rating – signifying serious deterioration and a strong risk for failure. This applied to aviation, dams, hazardous waste, inland waterways, levees, public parks, roads, schools, storm water, transit and wastewater. Think about that for a minute. How many of these foundational elements of our economy and general quality of life does any American want to forgo? Four other categories – bridges, drinking water, energy and solid waste – were stuck in mediocrity with a “C” grade. Only two categories were judged by the ACSE to be in relatively good repair – ports and rail received ratings of B- and B, respectively.