A bumpy ride for New York's drivers

A flood of friends from Europe have been visiting me in Manhattan. Mostly, they are thrilled by what they see: New York in springtime is radiant, with sunny skies, budding trees and a sense of giddy optimism in the air. But as the visitors pass through, they often ask: why are the roads so bad? According to the New York City Department of Transportation, a whopping 160,000 potholes were filled between December 2014 and March this year alone (almost 500,000 were repaired last year).

In spite of all that new tarmac, the streets remain pocked with so many holes, cracks and crevasses that driving round the city can feel like a developing-world adventure. Cars are constantly bumping up and down or swerving to avoid holes and orange cones.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Trip, a national transportation research group, recently declared that only 20 per cent of New York's roads are in a good condition (and that a staggering 27 per cent of the city's bridges are "functionally obsolete"). Is this just an inevitable part of New York life? Many residents seem to think so. They point out that winters are often harsh - the most recent one was particularly brutal.

In sub-zero temperatures tarmac tends to crack, particularly given the sheer weight of traffic passing over it each day. In an ideal world, these cracks would be fixed before they turned into potholes - that is what most other cold-weather cities do. But the New York City government is strapped for cash and it is harder to fix potholes when roads are covered in snow. New York has tried to solve the problem by assigning 50 extra crews of workers to remedy the problem; hence all those orange cones dotted around the city, snarling up traffic.

The issue reflects far more than bad weather or a lack of cash: America has a problem dealing with infrastructure of almost any kind. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, has conducted a number of seminars on the issue, which she will publish later this year in a book, Move - Putting America's Infrastructure Back in the Lead. This presents a sobering picture. According to Kanter, 24.3 per cent of bridges in America today are structurally deficient: nearly 600 failed between 1989 and 2013. Meanwhile, the roads are so clogged that the average American commuter is now wasting 38 hours each year in traffic jams; delayed or cancelled flights cost $30-$40bn a year.

"Once the Land of Opportunity, America seems to be entering the State of Delays," she writes. "There are traffic delays, travel delays, shipping delays, repair delays, project approval delays, delays caused by underfunding and delays in revisiting and revising obsolete assumptions."

America has more than enough money to fix these problems, Kanter points out; asset managers are drowning in cash that they want to invest. The country also has plenty of technological know-how and entrepreneurial zeal - hence all those driverless cars and other innovations tumbling out of Silicon Valley. And at the micro level, states such as Oregon are coming up with initiatives to make transport infrastructure more effective.

The real problem, Kanter suggests, is that there is so little public faith in government - or the power of collaboration - that it is hard to get the public and private sectors to work on any proactive solutions for infrastructure or to deal with unglamorous issues such as the maintenance of roads. "The United States is better at entrepreneurship than at joint action that requires public leadership to forge consensus," she concludes.

Maybe there will be change in the next few years. Some people close to Hillary Clinton are urging her to make infrastructure a central policy of her campaign. Others, such as Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, are also campaigning for a new drive to improve infrastructure. Parts of the Republican party are jumping on the issue as well, not least because business leaders are becoming increasingly worried.

In the meantime, that forest of orange cones - and those potholes - is likely to keep sprouting on Manhattan's streets. It is a peculiar state of affairs in a city that has one of the densest concentrations of wealthy people in the world. And it's a sobering reminder that countries cannot be created out of wild innovation alone. Sometimes a bit of basic maintenance - of potholes and much else - is even more important.

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Illustration by Shonagh Rae

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