Fragile Infrastructure Logic

A recent road accident in California raises attention nationwide, mostly because it is on CNN's front page.


This accident involves a tanker truck filled with gasoline. Involved in a single vehicle accident in the early morning hours today it is fortunate that no person was killed.

However, the massive amount of fuel spilled and then burning on the road destroyed a major commuting artery in the San Francisco area. This in turn will cause major problems for months in the San Francisco area. This in turn will cause major economic losses to businesses and people in the local region.

I've worked up in this area and taken flights to San Francisco and drive up to a client C&H Sugar. Everything comes to a pinch point at the bridge out there. So, perhaps you want to blame the people in California for making such a fragile system? This would be incorrect to do. Most major metropolitan areas come down to pinch points. Thinking of the tens of thousands of commuters that drive in to New York City from New Jersey on any given day and a similar accident on the George Washington Bridge??? That would be all bad.

You could blame the infrastructure in terms of roads and bridge conditions as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom does, but this too would be incorrect. Think about it for a minute. You have thousands of gallons of volatile liquid being spilled and then combusted on the roadway. This fuel gains its potency from burning hot when combined with Oxygen which is all around us. Any time a tanker truck spills its load on to the road and burns you are going to have major damage. If that particular roadway is an overpass or a bridge you can expect the metal components to come under stress.

There was a similar incident over in New Jersey on Route 80; however, it wasn't a bridge and just damaged the road to make it impassable. This was fixed relatively easily.

However, these tanker trucks drive millions of miles every year and for every mile drive it increases the chance of there being an accident or a sever accident. Each one of these tanker trucks represents a ticking time bomb to local economies.

There will be losses of fuel as people have to spend more time or more miles to get to their employment because of this accident.

It will take additional funds of unknown source to fix this roadway. It will cost more to fix because there will be lots of pressure inside and outside of the government to get this fixed as soon as possible.

Prices of local goods will go up (temporarily one hopes) and cost residents more money.

Major businesses that transport goods through the area will be heavily impacted.

Now, if we worked on a way to eliminate roads this wouldn't be a big issue. We can do this and reduce our risk as a society. This is only a preview of accidents to come. If this happened on the George Washington Bridge, it would affect me directly. It would most certainly affect millions of people as well.

At some point we need to stop the onward rush to do things and think and plan how our future will look and how secure it will be. All we are doing now as a society is madly rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off fixing the problem of today and not concentrating on the future.

There is a problem when almost all major road construction has to take place in the off-hours because on-hour construction would create traffic snarls that would damage the economy. Moving the time of construction treats a symptom, much like cough medicine, but does nothing to alleviate the underlying problem.

Adding more roads will help alleviate the symptom as well, but when I watched a show on the addition of infrastructure in the New Jersey area, it indicated that the new road will help in the short term - the next 6 months, but then the new roadway will also be running at over 100% capacity.

This appeared to be an affect of people wanting to go to places where it was easier to drive and get to. The new roadway offers this until there is no more capacity left. Then matters are as bad or worse than they were before.