Our December reader outlook survey that was a primary component of my cover story forecasting 2012 [page 8], was sent to leaders in transportation contracting industries and leaders of government agencies responsible for highways and bridges (i.e., you). I asked for more than numbers. I asked for voices. Give me your numbers, I asked, and then talk to me. Here, I thought, was a chance to gauge mood and mindset across a broad base.

I had lit a fuse. I got all that I bargained for and more in the piled-up pages of comments. Pent-up frustration is pressing on people who are deeply attached to their livelihood, people who have to find a way through another flat year. It is impossible not to feel the emotion and the frustration. But digging into the comments I began to find what I was looking for.

John Latta, Editor-in-Chief, jlatta@rrpub.com

There are patterns, trends and priorities. No, you don’t expect a great year, no surprise there. But you also don’t expect to sit back and hope it passes. You expect, come hell or high water, to get work done. Strategies to squeeze every funding dollar and cent emerge, concerns and plans for worst case scenarios are in there, and so are some optimistic, or at least bold, plans to take on the economy head first. The repair/maintenance/preservation balancing act features prominently in plans, so does an expectation for more bridge repair and rehab work.

There are fears of an “election-year slowdown,” and, how shall I put this, some colorful words for our elected representatives in Washington. A few of you expect some good times.

Surveys are important to us. In the last quarter of 2011 we reaped a harvest of information about our readers’ use of, and attitudes towards, social media, and we also conducted a general reader survey. And then the 2012 outlook survey.

Perhaps I ask too much, but the responses suggest you are willing to help us. In this rapidly-changing media environment, the role of magazines changes. In some fields, editors can run with the herd, making changes dictated by consultants and various shades of media gurus. But in our world, where magazines must have a use value, knowing who your audience is and what your audience wants and needs, are still the overwhelming driving forces.

That’s why we keep up with you.

by John Latta, Editor-in-Chief -- jlatta@rrpub.com

I can’t remember how old my son was then, maybe five, maybe six. We’d driven from Florida for a vacation in western North Carolina. It was well into the fall and it was sharply cold. The mists that make these mountains smoky came down below the peaks every day, sinking, settling on us like damp clouds. We swam in the creek for as long as we could stand its iciness and huddled with people from the other cabins around a huge bonfire listening to stories about moonshiners and Indians. We were deep in the Tusquitee Valley in the Nantahala National Forest. We’d make day trips: the Georgia Mountain Fair in Hiawassee, Murphy N.C.’s old shops, a favorite diner in Hayesville, N.C. We’d fish for trout at a stocked lake where we didn’t have to try very hard. Then we’d come back and burn big logs in the fireplace, maybe pan fry some trout.

For a six-year-old, pretty much everything can be interesting, but what most fascinated him was a road being built past the cabins. With the rain and the runoff, its surface when we arrived was, we decided, very much like chocolate pudding. But there were dry days and work would begin again. We’d lean on fence posts and watch. As I recall, we also found a flat rock that warmed when the sun came out, and we’d sit on it and watch.

Like a number of six-year-olds that you know, he never ran out of questions. What were these huge machines, what were they doing, why were they loud, why did they smoke, where did the road go, why did it come this way, when would it be finished, could he drive on it one day, why don’t they sink in the pudding, who’s driving them, where do they live, how do they get their lunch, and on and on. Back then, most of my answers were guesses. But he was fascinated.

What made me think of this after all these years (he’s 22)? What occurred to me I think is that maybe young people don’t choose careers with their gut as much as they used to. Just a passing hunch. But it seems such a clinical process to me sometimes. And no, my son didn’t go into road building; there are, after all, endless things to be enthusiastic about when you’re six. But I suppose I thought that if people in bridge and road industries shared their enthusiasm – because, man, you have it in spades — with children just waiting for someone to throw gasoline on their imaginative fires, it might turn out to be a very valuable investment.

Shakespeare almost certainly never wrote “fish or cut bait.” I don’t even know if he liked to fish. But he did write this in Act IV, Scene III of Julius Caesar.

We at the height are ready to decline.

There is a tide in the affairs of men.

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

John Latta, Editor-in-Chief, jlatta@rrpub.com

Alright, so it’s a stretch. Circumstances are not as they were when Brutus and Cassius were chatting about how to proceed in their war with Octavian and Marc Anthony. We are certainly not atop a flood tide that we can take advantage of. But are we at a stage where the failure to take advantage of the tide we do have could condemn us to a poorer infrastructure – with all of the downside that goes with that – than we need, than we deserve and than we could have? The Bard’s point perhaps is simply that if you miss a big enough opportunity (in our case even if it is effectively disguised in the clothing of a sick economy, dwindling budgets and an industry fighting to stay healthy), you may not see its equal again for a long, long time.

Look at the numbers in our annual inventory of the state of America’s bridges (page 8). We are perhaps not as bad off as we might be considering our economy. But it’s not good. My impression, call it a guess if you will, an educated guess if you feel kindly, is that a survey of highway engineers instead of bridge engineers would show us something similar in the state of our roads.

Certainly the stories we are being told, and you can read some of them and some pithy excerpts from the thoughts of our surveyed bridge experts, show a frustration born of knowing what must be done, and what should done and what could be done, and having to reconcile those possibilities with what can be done given the funding available.

One bold move could be the trigger that releases a flood tide. We may be the only major industry in that position today. The delay in Congress’ delivering a new surface transportation bill comes down to a single monster issue: funding. But the ultimate cost of a continued delay will almost certainly far outstrip the cost of finding adequate funding. Members of Congress, you do not determine the tides, and you do not create jobs and develop transportation infrastructure – this industry does. What you are doing is leading this industry into the shallows and keeping it from doing all that it can.

By John Latta

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Innovation may be the most powerful economic tool the bridge and highway industries have at their disposal right now.

Innovation is necessary in these recessionary times. When there is a sea change in our world – and this recession has created one – existing strategies and practices are inadequate.

But innovation is not something that can be handled by simply setting up a Chief Innovation Officer or an Innovation Task Force. It doesn’t happen because you throw people, time and money at it. Certainly some changes will come from such moves, but my guess is that they will often be somewhat predictable. Once brainstorming became a common word and practice in business, it became part of the company fabric and the people doing it often come up with little more than what is expected of them.

Daring to consider big-time innovations – and thinking and talking about it doesn’t contract you to do it – can help you identify new ways to work that would otherwise never appear on your radar. The innovating thinker has more ways to approach handling tough, changing times, than the thinker using a limited tool box of known quantities.

The ARTBA TransOvation conference last month (transOvation.org) was eye-opening. It helped me realize that if we don’t take the lead in changing our industry, we may end up following someone else’s lead that might take us somewhere we don’t want to go (because that someone else might be this economy or our elected representatives).

John Latta, Editor-in-Chief, jlatta@rrpub.com

I don’t have room here to convey even a handful of the ideas from the main speakers (who often get great ideas in the middle of nowhere doing things unrelated to their core business). But two stood out to me. I’ll paraphrase:

Failure is a key ingredient of innovation. Try to innovate and failure will usually come along for the ride. But it’s not the failure that matters, it’s the way you react to it. Criticize or penalize it, sit back and say, “I told you so,” and innovation is doomed. Easier said than done, I suspect.

3M is one innovative company. Always has been. The company allows some employees to spend 15 percent of their time, and some money, on innovating for improvement. No paperwork required. I asked 3M’s Jerry Karel if the company has any “how to” literature that could help other companies. I knew right away I shouldn’t have. Jerry kind of shrugged and told me what I should have learned – it isn’t written in stone, it’s not structured, it’s neither predictable nor cookie-cutter reproducible. That’s somehow the point. That’s why it works.

By John Latta

Britain’s premier war hero, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, victor of the Battle of Trafalgar, lost an eye in battle early in his career. Years later, he put a telescope to his blind eye, mid-battle, and reported that he saw no signal to disengage the enemy. Such willful willingness to fight is part of Nelson’s legend. In Washington, we see what the Brits might call a “Reverse Nelson.” Our politicians, rather than not seeing what is there, are seeing what isn’t there. They see various user-fee alternatives to higher fuel taxes as saviors of highway funding. Maybe. But not in this decade.

by John Latta, Editor-in-Chief, jlatta@rrpub.com

We also have what we might call a “Half Nelson.” Private investment money for transportation infrastructure is out there, waiting, in very large sums. Our politicians look but don’t see it clearly. They keep adjusting their telescope’s eyepiece trying to focus on exactly where it is, who has it, how it might be invested, and on and on. But nothing is happening except talk and eyepiece fiddling.

We need to light a fire under them. A new report from U.S. DOT (CR-2011-147) Office of Inspector General, entitled Financial Analysis of Transportation-Related Public Private Partnerships, might be a dandy fire-starter. It set out “to (1) identify financial disadvantages to the public sector of PPP transactions compared to more traditional public financing methods; (2) identify factors that allow the public sector to derive financial value from PPP transactions; and (3) assess the extent to which PPPs can close the infrastructure gap.”

The report is not benign. The Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole in his Surface Transportation Innovations newsletter Number 94 has called it, among other things, biased against PPPs, “rather bizarre,” and “a very disappointing piece of work.” The report’s modeling, analysis and assumptions are subject to Poole’s sharp criticisms, and Poole says anti-PPP forces are already using it to support their case. FHWA Administration Victor Mendez, rather bravely I thought, reacted to the report by writing a memo to OIG to put his position strongly, and it is included in the report as an Appendix.

I want to be a debate crasher, barging in and stirring things up. Waving this document over my head, figuratively anyway, may just cause enough fuss, enough debate and arguing, points and counterpoints, to light some fires. It may be controversial; I certainly hope it is because that might get people out of talking mode and into doing mode.

The OIG report it is worth reading, including, especially, Mendez’s Appendix. (oig.dot.gov/library-item/5599). And so are Poole’s well-reasoned comments at http://www.reason.org/newsletters/stinnovations/. Maybe we’ll have a three-cornered dialectic, adding a “Full Nelson” of volatile debate to the mix.

By John Latta, Editor-in-Chief

jlatta@rrpub.com

Perhaps it’s the difference between a clumsy retreat and an ordered withdrawal. The difference between a hurried, disordered lowering of intensity and an organized, purposeful regrouping.

If we must do more with less, and we must, at least we can do it the American way. And agencies all over the country are doing that. We have been used to having the tools and the funds we need to create and maintain a superb transportation infrastructure. Now we do not have enough of either.

The trick then is to approach the new problem with the old attitude.

If it wasn’t too corny, I’d say we need to build “Lemonade Roads.” Budget cupboards are almost bare, and we are being delivered only lemons. Anyway, that’s far too overworked so I won’t go there.

Making do with less, having to approach work that we know in the recent past would be far below our standard, a second or third choice, is not an easy mental, emotional or managerial exercise. It can be far too easy to see it as “make work” or stopgap work, something to tide us over until we can get back to the real work. But consider the war-zone work of the U.S. Navy’s Construction Battalions, the legendary SeaBees (CBs). Given the funds that could be scraped up for them, they squeezed every single drop (there’s the lemon again and I said I wouldn’t go there) out of them. What you didn’t see in their road, bridge and airfield building was a shoulder-shrugging concession to second-rateness. There was no suggestion that with better tools and more funds a proper job could be done, so we’ll just turn out something good enough for now.

Agencies and managers in charge of our bridges and roads are doing an extraordinary job of attacking the problem of dwindling funds, of having to do more with less. Like the SeaBees, they do work that is essential. It must be done and how it is done has severe short- and long-term consequences. I’m not a military historian, but I suspect that, when you fall back from a strong position, there is a danger that a sense of moving from offensive to defensive mindset can be a dangerous thing. Defeatism is a risk. What’s keeping this fallback as an aggressive approach to what has to be done now is the approach of the people doing it. Agency folk say we’re actually doing exactly what we did before; the very best work we can do for our highways and bridges under the circumstances. And when the circumstances get better, we’ll keep doing that.

By John Latta, Editor-in-Chief

This is dangerous. I’m using a term I didn’t know existed until a few minutes ago.

It’s happened because I went looking for an analogy for what is happening with our transportation infrastructure. What I found was thermal runaway. Essentially, as I understand it … let me punt and use a common Internet definition: “Thermal runaway refers to a situation where an increase in temperature changes the conditions in a way that causes a further increase in temperature, often leading to a destructive result…In other words, the term ‘thermal runaway’ is used whenever a process is accelerated by increased temperature, in turn releasing energy that further increases temperature.”

jlatta@rrpub.com

If we substitute the deterioration of our highways and bridges for heat, we have a deterioration runaway theory. As we continue to spend less than we should on our roads and bridges, they deteriorate at an increasing rate and that process in turn further increases the rate of deterioration. No, it’s not good science; it’s a jump too far. But it is a model worth considering. If we define deterioration as a degeneration that occurs over a given number of years, we can argue that the rate of deterioration is determined primarily by the amount, and type, of work done on the system. And the amount of work is determined by the amount of money available to pay for the work.

We already widely see agencies doing repair and maintenance work that is far less thorough than they would like. Absent adequate funding in our present economy they come up with formulae that let them do the best with what they have.

There is a minimum amount that we must spend on our transportation infrastructure each year just to keep it treading water, not getting better but not getting worse. The amount itself is moot in this argument, which is that every dollar less than that minimum spent now will expand like an unpaid credit card bill, so we’ll need four or five dollars to do the work it could have done.

There seems to be, especially in Washington, a perception that there is some sort of no-interest deterioration going on. We’ll put transportation infrastructure work on hold, or spend what we can, and when the good times roll again, we’ll catch up. But by then the catch-up bill will be too high. So we’ll spend less than is needed. And deterioration runaway theory will continue to apply.

The battle is not just over funding; it’s also to educate the public. Politicians were able to stall, and perhaps underfund, a new surface transportation bill because they knew it wasn’t a pressing enough issue in their voters’ minds. It should be.

By John Latta

April 27th. Tornadoes ravaged the South. Alabama was the hardest hit state. Tuscaloosa, our home town, saw the most destruction and the biggest loss of life in the state after a tornado almost a mile wide touched down and sliced through town, staying on the ground for miles. More than 7,000 homes and businesses in Tuscaloosa were destroyed, entire neighborhoods wiped out. So far we know 238 people died in this state, 41 in Tuscaloosa County.

A snapshot of a community is just that. It tells you something about a particular time in that community’s life. You’ve seen news videos and photographs of stunned people walking in the rubble and more pictures of volunteers pouring into devastated neighborhoods to help. But a snapshot’s value is limited when you want to assess that community. It is one photographer or videographer’s work, and generally published photos are taken with publication in mind. They meet certain professional impact standards.

by John Latta, Editor-in-Chief, jlatta@rrpub.com

Journalists also look for narratives, stories to tell. And the aftermath of the tornadoes provided pages and pages of them. These stories are also written with publication in mind; they conform to habits and practices of news media.

But to know a community requires an understanding of who the people are in those snapshots and stories, and the relationships that exist between them. You have to know more about the people in the pictures and the stories. And you have to be here to do that.

In the aftermath of the violence, the people in this town made me proud to live here. Their help to victims digging out was not just a burst of post-storm enthusiasm; it has not faded to this day. The resilience of the people hurt or left without homes and possessions is astounding. People became care givers, took in people, raided their pantries and closets, took their backyard or construction company equipment to work it cleaning up, saved pets, brought courage, laughter and high spirits into the wreckage, donated prom gowns and took nails out of tires and sharpened saw blades free of charge.

When you saw the images and read the stories, did you wonder about the people, who they were before the storm and how they will manage now? Know that they helped each other before the tornado hit, that they are members of extended families and cherish lifelong friendships, and they have a history of welcoming and helping strangers. Their roots go very deep in this town and their bonds don’t break easily. They will rebuild their lives and help rebuild the lives of others

They are the people in the pictures. They are my friends and neighbors.

When you are the person at the very top of the ladder, the world looks has to look different. That’s why Harry Truman had his The Buck Stops Here sign on his Oval Office desk.

by John Latta, Editor-in-Chief, jlatta@rrpub.com

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has to convert what he calls the President’s big, bold vision to transform our transportation landscape into a reality. So there’s a virtual Truman sign on his desk. It’s interesting, to say the least, to sit down with him and see how he feels about it.

What he did in our One II One interview (see Page 40) was to touch on the key points in this vision, the main changes that he wants to implement. You’ll recognize the buzzwords: high-speed rail, livability, sustainability, integration, reauthorization, distracted driving, jobs, red tape and congestion.

LaHood is nothing if not passionate about his job. I imagine it would be impossible to tackle if he wasn’t. There’s something of a gee-whiz enthusiasm to his approach to it. We are, he says, in transformational times and, “This is the moment. It really is.”

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama pointed out that our way of government can sometimes be “contentious and frustrating and messy.” But some countries, he said, don’t have this problem and in those places, “if the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed.”

Using the power to change the way we do things should be a contentious and frustrating and messy procedure. What the Administration wants to do with transportation should be a difficult transformation to achieve, dependent on a process that is subject to a variety of public influences in a variety of forms.

The biggest and boldest vision he is working with is high-speed rail. “We’re building on what others have done for us by saying we’re going to build the next transportation system for the next generation, which is high-speed rail.” There is, he says, no turning back. With HSR, and other initiatives, the Administration is claiming an Eisenhower-like ability to divine America’s transportation needs for the coming decades.

LaHood also recognizes that he is in charge at a critical time for our existing infrastructure. If “this is the moment,” as he says, then by definition it must be seized or lost. He intends to do that and I am part of the public voice that will keep his feet to the fire. But he also insists that transportation is still bipartisan, even today, and that, in the end, is the basis of his unbridled optimism.

I may have reservations, but he doesn’t.

By John Latta

Oscar Levant once said that behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel. So it is with Las Vegas, although in Sin City the attempt to pretend there’s substance beneath the facade is a little less intense. It’s a grittier place than Hollywood

jlatta@rrpub.com

CONEXPO in Las Vegas is the world’s largest construction equipment show every third year, as it was last month. It is our best construction industry barometer for the year ahead. This year it needed to be a hit show. It needed substance.

Someone else once said that if you put 12 economists in a room you’ll have 13 opinions. So my take on the event is just that, mine. I’m hesitant to be overly optimistic because recently economic optimism has been premature too many times. The wheels came off the ground but bumped back down again.

But there were signs of substance in Las Vegas.

OEM executives talk in code at trade shows. Everything is always going well. But sometimes the body language and the jargon reveal more, and I think they did this year, something between a collective sigh of relief and excitement. The OEMs brought a very wide range of equipment, booths sprawling with new and upgraded models they have invested in. Either they opened wide the check books because if this show didn’t explode maybe we’d never recover so make it look good, or they are investing in what they see as, finally, some long term substance to the recovery. The evidence suggests the latter. It also suggests that the climb will but slow and shallow, at least for the next year. But, right now, steadily upward is a good direction.

There was also evidence that the global economy is becoming more entrenched, more influential. America’s OEMs have been getting some vital income from exports and that has helped them stay the course. Their future is found not only in their U.S. plants but in facilities all over the world. The folks from France’s Intermat, and top executives from Germany’s bauma, the world’s biggest construction equipment trade shows in 2012 and 2013 respectively, were there. This business is cyclical so they needed the U.S. show to kick start a new cycle to get us off the ground. My impression was that they left satisfied.

That’s my take, but give me a break because recognizing the reality behind the hyperreal is difficult in this town. Stopped at a traffic light on Paradise Road not far from the Convention Center, a long, wide, 1956 pink Cadillac pulled up beside us. Elvis was driving. He waved. We waved. Viva Las Vegas. v