Regardless of your political leanings, there’s one word that angers Americans. That is “infrastructure”. Pothole-ridden roads, creaky bridges, and half-baked public transportation are holding us back across the country, as are most other examples. And that was before climate change caused coastal flooding, extreme heat, and extreme weather-driven wildfires to make matters worse.
America’s infrastructure was designed for the climate we enjoyed 50, 75, and even 100 years ago. Many are intolerable, endangering lives and disrupting supply chains. To bring all these roads, railroads, bridges, and entire cities back into the modern era, the Biden-Harris administration last week announced Approximately $830 million in grants will be disbursed through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021.of long list Projects include improving evacuation routes in Alaska, new bridges in Montana, wetland restoration in Pennsylvania, and everything in between.
“We know that if we want to build infrastructure that will last the next 50 or 100 years, it has to look different than the last 50 or 100 years,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
WIRED spoke with Buttigieg about the appeal of bipartisan infrastructure that uses nature rather than fighting it, and the immense triple benefit of getting people out of their cars and onto buses and trains. Ta. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Matt Simon: The United States is a very diverse place climatically. We have deserts and extreme heat, coastlines and sea level rise, and increasingly extreme rainfall. How will this new funding be used to manage all of this?
Secretary Buttigieg: Although circumstances vary across the country, transportation systems are affected by climate and other threats. It could be wildfires, it could be floods, sea level rise, landslides, droughts, or even earthquakes. All of these can affect the durability of the transportation system. And many of these things are becoming even more extreme.
One counterintuitive effect of climate change is increased rainfall. Much of this funding will go towards infrastructure upgrades to accommodate this type of flooding. What are the options?
For example, in Cincinnati, we are reinforcing retaining walls and actually installing sensors on hills to get ahead of the problem of landslides affecting roads due to heavy rainfall. West Memphis is investing in natural infrastructure. What’s interesting about this case is that it’s not actually the road itself. We’re investing in wetlands around roads to reduce the chance of flooding. This is part of how we protect the supply chain that runs along Interstate 55 and Interstate 40.
And sometimes you’re faced with a one-two punch. In Colorado, for example, Interstate 70 was damaged by a combination of fire and flooding. Wildfires occur, destroying the trees and root structures that hold the soil in place, followed by flooding. And the landslides that caused the long stretch of Interstate 70 to collapse several years ago are more likely. So we see again and again, and I think about it a lot as a former mayor, that it’s a fight against water in exactly the wrong places. That’s certainly a big part of what we have to deal with in our transportation system.
