Launching a new generation of motor graders a few years ago, Caterpillar had a dozen or so magazine editors manually operate the machines in a demonstration area . . . and in less than an hour we created a patchwork quilt of moguls and gashes and other signs of man’s inhumanity to soil.

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Walking across it was enough to damage one’s kidneys. Driving a wheeled machine across it was an invitation to permanent neck and spine damage. Then our hosts engaged the automatic grade-control systems on the machines and turned us loose again. Suddenly, we were all relatively competent blademen. Each of us was able to push through the lunar landscape we had just built and leave a relatively level path in our wake.

As I watched my editorial colleagues work, I felt a pang of sadness. I was thinking of the grizzled motor grader operators I’d met over the years, of watching them work their miracles, twitching eleven different levers at just the right time as the machine traversed winter-ravaged roads, magically erasing bone-jarring potholes and washboards, leaving behind an impossibly level and smooth driving surface.

In my mind, those operators were uniquely gifted, set apart from the rest of us mortals by an odd blend of vision, coordination and maybe balance that let them create a perfect surface with a machine that should have been impossible to operate. I was seeing the end of their era. It was like reading an homage to the cowboys of the late 19th century, or the fur trappers of the early 19th century.

In a few years, when the last of the great blademen retires, rural road maintenance will be in the hands of people not much more skilled than me.

This is perhaps a good thing for rural road agencies and for contractors, but it seems like a sad milestone for humanity. A human skill that once set a precious few apart from the rest of us, that defined a special dimension of human capability, is going to disappear just as the hard-riding cowboys and wilderness-exploring fur trappers disappeared.

For some reason I remembered a senior engineer I met at my first construction equipment press conference in the 1980s. He headed a team that created a new product line from a blank sheet of paper. He was still excited about it. So I was taken aback when he said he was retiring soon.

“Why?” I asked.

There were no groundbreaking new machine projects left to be done, he said. We were entering an era of caretaker engineering, tweaking this, painting that.

But by the end of that decade, we saw breathtaking advances in hydraulics, among other things. Next decade, it was electronics and computer controls. In the one after that it was merging electronics and hydraulics and exploring the potential of GPS and laser guiding systems. Along the way, the number of machine categories mushroomed, and the number of models within those categories grew exponentially.

Which brought us back to the Caterpillar demonstration, and the motor graders that even I could operate successfully.

Just before cold weather set in, Illinois-based Gallagher Asphalt demonstrated a new hot-in-place recycling (HIR) technology for the City of Chicago.

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Unlike traditional HIR processes, which heat and rejuvenate surface asphalt in place, the new Gallagher process heats the old asphalt, then scoops it into a rotating chamber where it is thoroughly mixed with a rejuvenating oil, and then places it back on the roadway with a paving screed.

The overarching benefit to the new process is that the rejuvenated surface course does not need an overlay or chip seal, like traditional HIR requires.

In terms of its significance to the heavy-construction industry, the Gallagher demo is a minor event. Hot-in-place recycling occupies a small slice of the pavement maintenance market, which is a fraction of the highway market, which is a fraction of the heavy-construction industry.

Seen through another perspective, though, it is the definition of how recessions end.

In the road industry, pavement budgets are swinging overwhelmingly to prevention strategies – interventions that extend the life of healthy pavements – because there isn’t enough money to tackle rehabilitation on a large scale. It will be years before this changes.

Gallagher’s substantial investment in what it calls re-heating HIR technology is a move to address the demands of a changing market. The company is the oldest and largest asphalt producer in Illinois and a leader in traditional HIR contracting. As a life-extending option for road agencies, the new process holds the prospect of lower cost – or, in the realities of our times, more lane miles of treatment for the same amount of money.

Less than 20 miles away, a company called Southwind RAS is completing its second year of collecting and processing old asphalt roofing shingles into a product that replaces up to 25 percent of the liquid asphalt in an asphalt mix.

Like Gallagher, the company’s leaders saw an opportunity in a changing market and invested in it. For Southwind, the opportunity stemmed from the run-up in asphalt cement prices in 2008. Even after liquid asphalt prices settled at around $400 per ton, Southwind’s recycled asphalt shingle (RAS) product costs less than half that much.

Demand for RAS is strong in Southwind’s marketing area, primarily because of the price advantage, but the product also lowers asphalt’s carbon footprint. Used in conjunction with reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) and warm mix technology, RAS helps make asphalt one of the greenest manufactured products in the world.

Gallagher Asphalt’s new in-place recycling technology also delivers its lower cost with a lower carbon footprint, the benefit of 100-percent recycled asphalt pavement and a process that eliminates haul-truck traffic to and from the jobsite.

There is a small lesson here, and a big one. The small lesson is, we are in an era of limited resources and we all need to adapt to the new realities. The big lesson is, the Great Recession is creating mega-changes in the U.S. construction market, and in any historic market shift, there will be new opportunities for those who are aware and willing.

Back in the mid-’70s, my personal profile was a cursed brew of idealism, pragmatism and acts of sheer self-indulgence.

kirk.landers@att.net

My burden was especially heavy in matters of environment and ecology. I could see the need for clean air, for example, but the awful cars that were produced in the middle of that decade in the name of cleaner air were a purgatory for driving enthusiasts.

I went along with the clean-air legislation, but I also rejoiced in the antics of the first couple of Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dashes (also known as Cannonball Runs), the outlaw races organized by Brock Yates, one of the greatest automotive writers of the era. His rebellion against the 55-mph national speed limit, bad cars and the legislation that produced them, coupled with the sheer freedom of the race — its only rules were where it started and ended — were a great release from the burdens of saving the environment and the other trappings of good citizenship.

Highways presented a similar schizophrenic dilemma for me. As one who loved open spaces and fast roads, interstates and freeways were a blessing and a curse — the curse being the sprawl that resulted when fast roads made 20-mile commutes easy… at least for awhile.

By the end of the decade, mainstream environmentalists almost universally condemned freeways as the work of the devil. My protests that roads don’t make sprawl, lack of zoning does, fell on deaf ears. Once again, I found my tree-hugging instincts at war with a love for great roads, each quality an anathema to different political constituencies — and different groups of friends and associates.

It was like being a Vietnam veteran. Hawks liked that you were a vet but figured you for a drug addict. Doves were OK with the drug abuse but thought you were a killer. If you didn’t use drugs or kill innocents, people didn’t believe anything else you said.

So the fact that I loved roads and cared about the environment had to be my little secret in the ‘70s and ‘80s, like Aunt Bee’s brandy bracer or the reverend’s penchant for cursing when the other team scored.

Imagine then the freedom I feel in the 21st century when I can proclaim to my tree-hugging friends that our pavements are among the greenest man-made structures in our civilization. Asphalt is the most recycled product in the country, and concrete is very high on the list, too. Thanks to improvements in design, materials and processes, the service life of pavements has been dramatically extended, even as usage has skyrocketed. Carbon emissions in the processes that create concrete and asphalt have declined steeply in the past two decades, and continue that downward trend.

Porous asphalt, pervious concrete and open-graded friction course improve environmental water quality, enhancing sensitive ecosystems.

And here’s the other part: I can proclaim to my pro-industry friends that all of the advances in the environmental integrity of pavements have enhanced the cost effectiveness of pavements, too. Recycling reduces costs. Warm-mix asphalt extends the paving season and makes possible longer delivery routes while also enhancing compaction. Technologically-advanced concrete and asphalt mixes lead to thinner pavements and less material required to carry the same loads. The list goes on…

These are indeed great times for long-suffering closet-cases like me. Not only can I openly love roads and the environment, I can even confess to being a Vietnam veteran without losing friends.

By Kirk Landers

I sat down to write this column on the weekend of 9/11, and like most of us Americans, all I could think about was where I was when, and what it all meant.

kirk.landers@att.net

Our Better Roads crew was in suburban Philadelphia that morning, getting ready to leave for another day at the 2001 American Public Works Association Show. As I waited near the car for the others, someone yelled down to the parking lot from the second floor of the motel that an airplane had just flown into the World Trade Center. Soon others popped out of their rooms to exchange expressions of amazement.

One of our guys opened his door and called us in. As we watched film and commentary on the first incident, the second one occurred. As television journalists sifted through the confusion to find the facts of what we’d seen, rumors started flying in the motel about flights being canceled, bridges being closed, the world stopping.

We knew there would be no show that day, and probably no flights. We rented a car and headed west, hoping the bridge rumors were false.

They were, but an impression had already been made in my mind. An entire lifetime of taking bridges for granted was changed on that day. We all realized that a 1,200-mile trip could have been a 2,000-mile trip or no trip at all without the bridges we all take for granted.

The endless drive to Chicago was devoid of the usual banter between us. Radio coverage of the event became monotonously circular, the handful of facts about the attack constantly recited in cycles separated by filler. It was a passing marked by long periods of boredom and brief fits of rage.

At one fuel stop, a young man tending to his pickup offered the loud opinion that New York deserved what it got. Lest we forget, America was then, as now, a bitterly divided place, at war with itself over issues mostly invented by politicians to raise money and get elected.

In the days to follow, that yokel’s sentiments would be echoed by street people in the Middle East, who told television reporters that they didn’t approve of the act, but America had it coming.

That big-mouth American at the gas station almost certainly awoke the next day a chest-thumping super-patriot, driving about with American flags flying from his vehicle, angrily denouncing the terrorists, raging over the sentiments of Middle Eastern street people who said America had it coming. How ironic, eh?

Great acts of courage and selflessness took place at Ground Zero, and thousands of young people were inspired to volunteer for the armed forces. We have spent 10 years composing prose that celebrates our heroes and our national spirit and unity.

I join in that celebration, but as I think back on that day, and on where we are now, it’s not all flag-waving and cheers I feel. I remember feeling privileged that day, that we could drive hundreds of miles at highway speeds to get home on the eve of a national catastrophe. I think of Ike Eisenhower, the political architect of our Interstate system, and the weeks it took him to move coast to coast before the Interstates.

His highway system, our investment in bridges, our commitment to connectivity all served to reduce the effects of a catastrophic event in America.

In the decade since the terrorist attacks, we are still a country at war with itself. We are a country that wants to pay the $4-trillion debt for the anti-terrorist wars with a tax cut. And we are a country that is letting its magnificent system of roads and bridges erode for lack of investment.

Forgive me, but while I gratefully honor the heroism and sacrifice of that day, part of me feels a great sadness that the rest of us have fallen so short of their example in the decade since.

In their memory, let us raise a cup to the decade ahead. Let us resolve to do more, be better, and accomplish great things together.

By Kirk Landers

Early last month, our “parliament of dunces” completed a fiery session of Congressional dodgeball — that’s where life flings issues at the champions of the hill, and they duck and dodge each one while maintaining a steady flow of loud invective that manages to be angry and meaningless at the same time.

kirk.landers@att.net

Among dozens of other things, the body politic didn’t deal with the debt crisis and didn’t pass a transportation act. The latter is nearly two years overdue, and the uncertainty of federal funding has reduced America’s road program to pavement maintenance work — this, at a time when major construction is needed and would employ millions of people who are not currently employed.

Congress’ culture of smug failure was further advanced at the close of the summer session by 14 Republican senators who introduced a bill that would allow states to opt out of the federal-aid highway program. The so-called State Transportation Flexibility Act would allow states to just take the federal fuel taxes collected in their states and run.

Predictably, the signatories to this act represent states that pay more into the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) than they receive.

Seems reasonable, right? Especially in today’s me-first/you-suck culture. Why should the good people of Texas or Louisiana put up a fraction of a cent per gallon to maintain a national highway system that covers states such as Montana and Alaska, vast geographic areas with small populations?

Indeed, one of the perennial leaders of this movement, Arizona Sen. John McCain (R), would like to do away with the federal program altogether. And hey, why not? What business does the government have in roads, anyway?

Well, the simple answer lies in what our road system was like before the federal program blossomed into its modern form and brought us the Interstate Highway System, not to mention the huge improvements in road design and safety that now characterize highway travel in these fractiously united states of ours. Without a federal overseer, primary roads were subject to local whims, not only in terms of quality, but also in terms of where they went. Getting from coast to coast took Dwight D. Eisenhower weeks when he tried it in 1919.

But there’s a bigger issue than the practical one: Are we actually a country any more, or have we become a nation of money-grubbing morons so focused on our own navels that we no longer wish to work together to accomplish great things?

Evidence of the latter starts with Arizona Sens. McCain and John Kyl (R), who is also the Senate Minority Whip. They represent a state that relies on other states for things like water, energy and everything that arrives in this country through a seaport.

Louisiana is worried about getting cheated by the feds on roads, but that state has received billions and billions in federal aid to help its recovery from hurricane devastation.

Several Southeastern states signing on to the fuel tax act get huge infusions of federal money for the military bases they house. That especially includes Texas, where military construction has played a significant role in helping that state sustain one of the strongest economies in the United States during the Great Recession while dozens of military-donor states suffer.

So how about we let the fuel-tax-donor states go their own way, and the military-spending-donor states go their own way, and the port states, and the water states, and so on and so on?

The idea is so stupid it probably doesn’t rate a column in a trade magazine. And yet, in this Congress of dunces, that’s what passes for great thinking from 14 percent of the Senate.

Another Beltway Miracle!

By Kirk Landers

 kirk.landers@att.net

Just when it seemed only a miracle of Biblical proportions could deliver onto the United States a federal transportation program, just when it seemed that our dithering body politic meets only to have big arguments over small ideas, just when we thought joblessness and infrastructure decay could only get worse not better . . . Rep. John Mica (R-FL), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has saved us.

Oh ye of little faith! Could there have been any doubt?

Just a few days after Independence Day – how fitting, eh? – the good chairman served notice that America’s infrastructure has been saved by a brilliant reauthorization proposal he and his committee have introduced.

The press release makes you want to dance. It describes a bill that streamlines and reforms federal programs, expedites the project approval process, maximizes leveraging of limited resources, provides flexibility for states and ensures long-term funding stability for job-creating transportations programs.

Let the Red Sea part! Let the highway angels go forth in song like so many parakeets! America’s roads and bridges have been saved!

True, when you get to the fine print in the analysis of the bill, the actual funding levels of the “Mica Miracle” are a return to the Nineties. But at least it’s the 1990s. It could have been worse.

The important thing is, the states will now have certainty about federal funding, and they can get their money really fast. Indeed, we will be able to run highway programs out of petty cash.

What makes you really proud about this legislation is that it’s delivered with a straight face, as though something important had been soberly weighed and carefully analyzed, when in fact all the makers of Mica’s Miracle did was project fuel tax receipts for six years and kiss each other on the lips.

We taxpayers should not have to pay these stiffs to debate this bill. The only constructive purpose such a debate could offer is keeping this parliament of misfits from declaring war on another third-world country and paying for it with another tax cut.

But let me not give Congressional Republicans sole credit for this fiasco.

The tepid objection from the left came from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who says she favors a two-year plan with more money, with the difference in spending and fuel tax receipts coming from general revenues. Our general revenues, you may have heard, are already spoken for. And then some. This is like lobbing snowballs in hell.

Meanwhile, the Mineta Transportation Institute released the results of a national survey that indicates a large majority of Americans – 62 percent – would support a 10-cents-per-gallon fuel tax increase if revenues are specifically to improve road maintenance.

But advocating a fuel tax increase in today’s Congress would be a feckless act of courage, and what passes for courage in this assembly are carefully parsed statements indicating that perhaps the earth is round and perhaps the sun does not revolve around it.

Obviously, things in America and in the transportation industry have to get much, much worse before they can get better.

By Kirk Landers

General Motors chairman and CEO Dan Akerson caused a brief outbreak of raised eyebrows in the business community last month when he told the Detroit News that he would rather see the U.S. government raise the fuel tax 50 cents per gallon than issue another generation of corporate fuel economy standards.

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Few things in today’s America are less American than advocating a tax increase of any kind for any reason, but Akerson’s sentiments were based on cold, hard fiscal realities.

Within the auto industry, domestic companies have competed at a disadvantage with Asian and European manufacturers for years because U.S. fuel prices have been so much lower than fuel costs elsewhere in the world. Our market has evolved to favor V-8 engines, big sedans and especially truck-based vehicles, while Europe and Asia gravitate to 4-cylinder engines, and compact and subcompact cars.

When fuel prices cycle upwards periodically, domestic car makers are castigated for the stupidity of their offerings. But when fuel prices cycle down again, lines form to buy SUVs, vans, pickups and big sedans.

A high fuel tax could do a lot to stabilize demand for fuel-efficient cars in the U.S. and that would help domestic manufacturers put more resources into developing such cars which, in turn, would make domestic products more competitive on the world stage.

The other tree of benefits stemming from a huge fuel tax increase is well known in the road industry. America could address festering deficits in its road and bridge infrastructure, including the capacity problems, while generating millions of new jobs at a time when the country is desperate for employment growth.

The downside would be a dramatic decrease in non-essential driving, and a diminishing market for large vehicles. Recreational driving would come back — just count automobiles around tourist attractions on weekends in Europe, where gasoline has been over $5 a gallon for years — but demand for truck-based vehicles in metro areas probably would not.

Unfortunately, the rational pros and cons of a 50-cent fuel tax increase have never been seriously debated in America. Too many politicians are in the business of getting reelected to get entangled in the complex business of solving serious problems. From the political right or left, the temptation to take a superficial, demagogic stance is just too great. Why examine the possibilities of such a controversial suggestion when you can win votes by nobly slamming the door on the thought…for the good of the poor, or to save our flagging economy, or just because taxes are an abomination on mankind?

What is interesting — and hopeful — is that some significant voices from America’s business community are putting forth the notion that increasing the fuel tax can help us solve some short-term and long-term problems. Akerson is the latest example of that, but he has been preceded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a beacon of small-government conservatism in America, and the American Trucking Associations, whose members live and die with small fluctuations in fuel prices.

By Kirk Landers

America was just emerging from the oil-embargo recessions of the ‘70s when Ford ended a long, miserable period of automobile engineering by introducing several stunning new models, including an ‘80s reprise of the Boss 302 Mustang. It combined the head-snapping performance of the first pony cars with a level of fuel efficiency once thought impossible in a V8 engine.

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An act of providence gave me almost exclusive access to the cars and to Ford’s proving ground facilities for a morning. I used the opportunity to drive the vehicles maniacally in several different venues. It was while driving the Mustang on the handling track — and spinning out repeatedly — that I realized America was once again fielding cars that could go fast enough to kill yourself in.

It was an odd sensation and it has never left me.

On one hand, as a young automotive editor, it was a moment of ecstasy in a day filled with unending joy. We had been driving ugly, underpowered econoboxes for nearly a decade. Unless you built your own car, driving had become tedium. I used to dream of getting out of my wretched company car and shooting it with a pistol, like a cowboy putting down a horse with a broken leg. It was the only moment of pleasure I got from the vehicle.

Enter the re-engineered 302-cubic-inch V8 Mustang. It seemed like — and was — the beginning of a new era for car enthusiasts in America.

But there was this other rush, too, a more sober one: You really could kill yourself in a vehicle like this, one that begged to be driven hard right up to the time you wrapped it around a tree or rolled it a few times in to a ditch.

That moment of rational insight didn’t change my appetite for hot cars, though my choices have been an eclectic spectrum defined on one end by a Corvette and on the other by a Mini Cooper S. But it did plant a thought that changed how I drive, and changed my perspective on highway safety.

In the ‘90s, when I got involved with road issues as a construction writer, I learned that rural roads produce a much higher rate of fatalities than other driving venues in America. I understood. Quiet, bucolic country roads can produce the same kind of narcotic effect that hot cars do, encouraging people to focus on the aesthetics of the driving experience rather than the weighty responsibilities that come with it.

My Mustang moment also changed my attitude toward safety advocates, who had been painted as overbearing, car-hating bureaucrats in the automotive press of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

That evolution came full circle last year, when the Federal Highway Administration issued a report showing that the rate of driving fatalities per vehicle miles driven had fallen to the lowest number in decades. FHWA attributed the breathtaking improvement to a combination of proactive measures, including programs to improve the safety of rural roads, to increase seat belt usage, and to crack down on impaired and/or distracted drivers.

As one who considered much of that effort to be political propaganda, I have to say, I’m impressed. And I was wrong. I thought 50,000 traffic fatalities annually, give or take a few thousand, was a reasonable number and one that we would never really improve upon. Fortunately, others were not encumbered with my beliefs and made real progress in an important area.

Finally, one of the most striking things about the programs that produced this improvement is that they cost very little. In a political culture where opportunistic politicians and media personalities rant endlessly about government inefficiency, this example of remarkable efficiency has gone largely unreported.

I can’t make up for that, but I can say thanks to all who persevered and overcame. Your work has made our lives better.

If this were a movie or a television sitcom, it would be funny.

By Kirk Landers

In March, Sen. David Vitter (R-La) introduced a bill that mandates a 50-year lifecycle cost analysis on infrastructure projects involving $5 million in federal funds or more. His bill also requires all states adopt the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide, among other things.

kirk.landers@att.net

Well, who could oppose that, right? Being opposed to lifecycle cost analysis is like being opposed to Santa Claus. Who could possibly object to such fiscally responsible legislation?

But look again. Vitter’s bill addresses a problem that isn’t a problem. State departments of transportation have been using lifecyle cost analysis and the mechanistic-empirical design method since long before somebody whispered in Vitter’s ear that Congress should design highways.

Here’s another problem. Vitter’s $5 million threshold is suspiciously low. That takes in routine maintenance activities, like chip seals, mill-and-fill, simple overlays, full-depth concrete joint repairs and a large spectrum of normal bridge maintenance. Doing a 50-year analysis of maintenance interventions just adds mountains of paperwork and months of delays to a process that industry and government alike want to streamline.

So why would a small-government guy become a champion for more paperwork, more construction delays, and more office time for our dwindling population of highway and bridge engineers? It’s one thing to generate a lifecycle cost analysis for new construction or major reconstruction of a road or bridge — something that is already required on federal-aid projects — but expanding the scope to maintenance interventions is absurd. Who benefits from that?

But perhaps the most obscene aspect of Sen. Vitter’s bill is that it supposes there is enough money in the system to support a road program in which every intervention will produce a half century of service.

In point of fact, road and bridge management in America today is the science of compromise — how to deploy funds that can’t fix everything in such a way that the system’s deficits don’t get worse . . . or, when things are really bad, controlling the rate of decline in the system.

In today’s reality, the longest-lasting solution isn’t always the best solution when it comes to managing roads and bridges. As we have learned in the pages of Better Roads over the years, the professionals who manage our road and bridge assets most effectively are the ones who make their decisions based on what’s best for the long-term interests of the system, not for the individual road or bridge. In this era of insufficient budgets, highway managers are often faced with the choice of rebuilding one mile of pavement versus maintaining 10 miles. The last thing we need now is federal legislation dictating that road managers do the rebuild and let the rest of the system fail.

The decision to rebuild, maintain, replace or neglect pavements needs to be made on a state or local basis. The design of a new pavement and the selection of materials is always dependant upon local conditions — the soils, the environment, traffic loads and the availability of materials and contractors, to name just a few.

Highway engineering in America today is world class, from pavement design to maintenance practices to cost-effectiveness system management. Someone needs to tell Sen. Vitter we don’t have a problem designing and building long-life roads and bridges in America; we have a problem with weak-kneed elected officials who don’t want to pay for long life roads and bridges in America.

High-speed Rail and Us

By Kirk Landers, kirk.landers@att.net

An industry pundit recently took the Obama Administration to task for not allowing the state of Wisconsin to use its grant for high-speed rail development to improve the state’s roads.

Wisconsin was one of several states that won Stimulus grants for high-speed rail during the gubernatorial administrations of Democrats or moderate Republicans, then elected conservative governors in 2010 who returned the grants with great fanfare, pronouncing high-speed rail a fiscal folly and federal programs the work of the devil.

Apparently, the Wisconsin governor was willing to take the filthy federal lucre, but only on his terms.

Why, I wonder, should Wisconsin get high-speed rail money for its roads? Its contribution to the federal coffers is substantially less than, say, California’s or Texas’. And if we’re not going to spend the money on high-speed rail, why spend it on Wisconsin roads? Why not spend it on deficit reduction in my home state of Illinois, or to buy candy bars and ice cream for kids in your state on the 4th of July?

Rhetorical grandstanding aside, there’s no reason to spend that money on something else. It is borrowed money and even if you are not yet blindly panicked by the country’s annual deficits, you probably would concede that they are a problem and maybe Wisconsin drivers should pay for Wisconsin roads and Illinois taxpayers should resolve Illinois’ debts and you can decide whether or not to buy candy bars and ice cream for the kids in your state on the 4th of July.

While the blogger who wanted to give your money and mine to Wisconsin was simply engaging in partisan politics, the high-speed rail question is one of great significance to the road industry.

I’m not smart enough to know if high-speed rail is feasible — and neither are you, and neither are the legions of critics who have taken aim at the program. What I know for certain is that high-speed rail is what we used to call in the country a “mega-project” — like the Interstate Highway System, Boston’s “Big Dig,” the Hoover Dam and the transcontinental railroad, to name a few. What I also know for certain is that mega-projects are no longer something Americans have the courage to pursue, and high-speed rail is the latest example of that.

Mega-projects aren’t about money. They are about vision and optimism. All of today’s fiscal condemnations of high-speed rail were voiced six decades ago when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was trying to launch the Interstate Highway System. The costs of the system were just as grand as high-speed rail and the benefits were not at all apparent. No one, not a single person in that debate, could possibly have predicted the profound effect those unbuilt highways would have on the American economy, our international competitiveness and our culture. But post-World War II America was a place of optimism and can-do spirit, and eventually Eisenhower was able to pass an Interstate highway act — flawed and underfunded, to be sure, but it got us in the game.

Today’s America can’t get past the cost part of a mega-project, and we are doomed to be a lesser nation for it. Quick, what do you know about Boston’s Big Dig? Breathtaking cost overruns, right? It reinvented a major city, created billions of dollars of new real estate, and enhanced the value of existing real estate for decades, perhaps centuries. It will pay for itself many times over in the years to come.

This is directly related to America’s inability to maintain and improve its roads. We the people — and the people we elect to office — equate roads with costs, but not with opportunity. And so this thing that made us great, this highway system, languishes.