In 1916, Emily Post published her book about driving across America. Yes, that Emily Post, the society maven who invented the modern etiquette column. Before she started telling us all how to behave, she wrote “By Motor to the Golden Gate,” which is still worth reading more than a hundred years later. Not just because Post is a delightful writer with a keen ear for the telling vignette, but because her book sheds light on an issue that’s on everyone’s minds these days: infrastructure, and why we can’t seem to build it any more.
Post was born at the beginning of America’s “special century,” the period between 1870 and 1970 when we traded muscle power for motor power, moved from farms to cities and built most of our public infrastructure. In 1916, much of that infrastructure was still in the future. The rail network was largely built out, cities had made enormous strides in water treatment and electrification was well underway. But outside cities, telephone networks were still primitive and paved roads scarce. Unfortunately the rural areas were where most people still lived. 1920, when America crossed the 50 percent urbanization mark, lay four years and one world war away.
So motoring across the country meant navigating dirt roads that threw up dust when it was dry and dissolved into mud puddles when it rained, forcing the traveler to hole up in a hotel for days or weeks until the road could be dried out and repaired. In the sparsely populated West, Post had to do some patching herself, using barrel staves to plug ruts that ran deeper than the 10-inch clearance of her car’s undercarriage.
Post downplayed these frustrations with well-bred WASP understatement. But you can imagine how grueling it must have been to pick up those barrel staves and lay them down in a rut over and over, or to sit in an open car that was barely inching through the desert. You can also imagine how good it must have felt to get back onto a paved road.
Hold onto that thought, because it’s relevant to something else that comes through in her writing — the incredible optimism and wild ambition that runs through Post’s America. The Midwest, particularly, seems to be in the middle of a youthful growth spurt, with cities springing up out of the prairie full of vim and vigor and plans for the future.
That sense of optimism, or rather, our longing for it, is at the heart of the Republican nostalgia politics I tweaked in last week’s column. And the Democratic nostalgia politics I could have tweaked, because it’s also a powerful force. Where Republicans yearn for the bygone days of tariffs and factory jobs and nuclear families, many Democrats long to reenact the welfare state expansions and titanic infrastructure projects of the 20th century — down to branding climate policy as a “Green New Deal.” But really both those groups are asking why we can’t recapture the spirit of an age when America felt young and hopeful and capable of doing extraordinary things.
It’s a great question. But after following Emily Post across America, I think the answer is that we already did them.
There’s an old joke about an engineer who finds a colleague banging his head against a brick wall.
“Why are you doing that?” he asks.
“Because it feels so good when I stop.”
It feels really good when you can stop running across a frozen yard in your nightshirt and just pad down the hall to an indoor toilet; when you exchange sooty kerosene lamps for clean electric lights; when you trade jolting over dirt and cobblestones for gliding over smooth macadam. But those are one-time transitions, and once they’re over, you’ll never feel that same sweet relief again.
You can try to relive that excitement by installing a second bathroom, developing a more advanced power grid or constructinga bigger highway. But the more infrastructure you build, the more the marginal utility of new infrastructure declines.
Think of it this way: If your house has no bathroom, installing one is a no-brainer. If you have two bathrooms already, well, is having a third place to powder your nose really worth the hassle and expense of construction? Something similar is true of big public projects. When the Golden Gate Bridge was built in the 1930s, it turned a long ferry ride into a quick drive. Widening the bridge, or building another nearby, might make traffic move faster. But not as much as moving from a ferry to a bridge.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Infrastructure’s diminishing returns since the Golden Gate – The Washington Post
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