Making Infrastructure Spending Really Smart For The Next 100 Years The Geographic Approach

When people say “smart infrastructure,” they mean it: Iowa roads in winter.

Each glacier in Iowa displays its exact location and speed along with the temperature of the road being cleared. Hundreds of snowplows are equipped with windshield-mounted cameras that show road conditions from the driver's perspective. All of this data is combined with 700 fixed cameras, 75 weather stations, and real-time traffic flow data and sent to Iowa Department of Transportation servers.

The result: When a thunderstorm hits, Iowa drivers can open a dashboard on a computer or smartphone to see road conditions - whether the road is open, how traffic is moving and even what the road looks like. This tracked plow dashboard has been a popular site for billions of people since the Covid pandemic. It combines information from a dozen different sources in a way that sounds like science fiction from a decade ago and provides a vivid, intuitive picture of what is happening and where.

Schools and businesses can best decide to stay open during heavy snowfalls. Transport companies know if their trucks can pass and where the safest and fastest route is. Iowa DOT can see which roads need plowing the most, with what urgency, and which plows are closest to problem areas.

It's creative. Is usefull. It has become superfluous.

But there is more. As the United States embarks on the most sweeping infrastructure overhaul in seven decades, this is the kind of new tool we need to adapt to different institutions: an efficient system to take care of our roads, of our water systems and our bridges. And power grids and airports, in ways we haven't been able to do before. It's a way to combine geography and data to manage and build key parts of our everyday world (water pipes or highways blocked by snowstorms) in a much smarter way.

Last November, the Biden administration successfully made the largest investment in U.S. infrastructure since the Interstate Highway System came into effect in 1956, totaling $1.2 trillion. Adjusted for inflation, that's double the historical amount we've spent building highways.

But we can't just rebuild our roads and bridges, move our power lines, and bury our water pipes as usual. When we do, we waste money, neglect long-neglected communities, and miss the opportunity to improve everything we care about every day and for decades to come.

The truth is, America's infrastructure was built for a climate we don't live in. While aging water systems and road challenges have always been a struggle, today's changing climate makes extreme weather events even more urgent. Last month, record-breaking storm surge from Hurricane Ian battered infrastructure in southwest Florida, causing severe flooding and power outages.

Some leaders take a geographic approach and use technology to build the infrastructure we need for a changing world.

That's what Iowa's "Track A Plow" system does. It sounds simple, but it's important for all people who use the street. Behind the scenes, it's a more powerful transportation management and maintenance tool that allows Iowa DOT to understand how much it costs to plow each section of road, which storms are the most expensive to manage, and the use of salt. Roads that have saved the state more than $2.5 million annually. This system creates resilience and adaptability in its structures.

That's why we should use a small fraction of the budget for each new infrastructure project - 5%, 10% - to add sensors to create digital models of everything we do, i.e. every highway and every bridge, every power line and every connection. . of the airport. Like all highways in Iowa, it has its own standards.

We must use this time to equip the infrastructure with its own infrastructure.

"Intelligent infrastructure" is not only about money, but also about mentality.

During the Covid pandemic, San Francisco International Airport (SFO) undertook a $7 billion renovation that included a 60% reduction in air traffic, two terminals, a new Grand Hyatt hotel, a new building, a administrative building and a new car park. Garage

Every inch of the new work has been digitized, from the depth of the foundation pillars to the security situation to the type of lock on each door. People who manage and maintain SFO can instantly click through 3D images of the airport with incredible levels of detail: what furniture is on each door, what color, what material, date of installation.

The version of the SFO that lives on airport computers – the geographic “digital twin” or “dynamic twin” – is updated in real time, including the flow of people through the terminals. How long does it take for the sidewalk to reach the door? Passengers can see immediately. When it's time to replace the HVAC filters in the hallway, the repairman can take a digital photo of the ductwork, how many filters the room needs, what type is needed for each area, if the correct filters are in stock , even if a specific l area needs a scale.

The benefits of digitizing infrastructure are numerous.

The Colorado DOT has started using digital infrastructure to protect state highways from collapsing. In Connecticut, engineers are using digital imagery and high-resolution sensors to replace an 1896 railroad bridge that spans four lanes over the Norwalk River. This allows the new bridge to be partially constructed safely while the old bridge is in service.

The ability to make our infrastructure “smarter” brings together the connected technologies of the past decade: affordable sensors and cameras; Cheap and always available wireless connections; Advanced plotting and mapping programs; And geographic information system software to put all that very fragmented data on a website or mobile app and update it in real time.

It is an efficient system, our infrastructure is an intelligent nervous system. It not only changes what we know, but also how we make decisions. We know exactly what needs to be done, when and where it needs to be done.

Let's look at only part of the infrastructure account.

45,000 bridges in the United States need serious repairs and rehabilitations.

Biden's infrastructure bill calls for $40 billion in bridge work, a huge sum, less than $1 million per bridge in distress. Of course, that $40 billion is only enough to fix maybe 10% of the bridges, or even less.

This highlights the need to be smart in choosing to fix bridges and how we fix them. What we're really doing is creating a new generation of bridges and all of our infrastructure that's easy to maintain and inexpensive to maintain.

The pandemic has exposed a huge gap in America's infrastructure: the digital divide. Millions of American families, especially in rural and tribal areas, do not have access to high-speed Internet. Biden's infrastructure effort includes $65 billion to expand broadband access, more money than for airports, water systems or bridges. The first step to spending money efficiently, using broadband to get it to the most unexpected places, is knowing who doesn't currently have it . And when deciding where to lay new fiber optic cables, we can ask those maps important questions for justice.

A century ago, a group of determined leaders laid the foundation for America's drinking water system. The National Electricity Grid was created eighty years ago. The road network sixty years ago. Every hour of every day, America's economy, health, safety, and standard of living continue to depend on all that infrastructure: modern technology.

Today, we have the opportunity not only to repair our old highways and bridges, our damaged waterways and our aging airports, but also to modernize them for the new century. Creating for the next 50 and 100 years the architects, engineers and builders who created America in the 1920s and 1950s.