America will experience the ramifications of ultra low interest rates (2001 - 2005) and the housing bubble for years to come. In many cases, local government officials were not prepared to deal with a deluge of building requests starting in 2001 and did not envision the effect on civil infrastructure. In addition, it is not clear if reasonable assumptions were made considering the wear and tear on existing assets over time ex the building boom.
According to an article published in the WSJ today, there will be an estimated $2.1 trillion needed to fix American infrastructure. This is the list (in billions of Dollars):
$930 Roads and bridges
$265 Transit
$255 Waste water (and drinking water)
$160 Schools
$87 Aviation
$85 Public parks and recreation
$77 Hazardous and solid waste
$75 Energy
$65 Rail
$50 Inland waterways
$50 Levees
$12.5 Dams
Dugan, Ianthe J., 2010. Strapped cities hit nonprofits with fees. The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27.
Besides these costs there are other infrastructure issues that are probably not covered, namely how the US economy will adapt to rising energy costs.
As the price of petroleum increases, there will likely be radical changes needed to existing infrastructure. The above cost projections are perhaps just incremental maintenance and improvement for infrastructure designed under different assumptions regarding energy (transportation) costs.
For example, as energy prices increase it will become prohibitively expensive to ship food across the US unless there are significant changes to the nation's railway or ocean freight system (increased use of refrigeration). These costs are not captured above.
I also believe regional food systems will play a significant role in changing America's infrastructure as transportation costs increase. I do not think there are sufficient systems in place to deal with this anticipated change.
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