That pothole that nearly swallowed your car this morning wasn’t your imagination — Hawaii’s 9,799 miles of public roadway and 1,153 bridges are rough and getting worse.
Consider that some components of the state’s most critical infrastructure assets are more than 100 years old. Indeed, Hawaii residents log 58,500 daily crossings over a bridge in Honolulu County that was built in 1934 and which civil engineers rate as structurally deficient. It’s just one among the more than 7% of structurally deficient bridges across the islands that are fast approaching the end of their useful and safe life.
According to the most recent national scorecard by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, Hawaii ranks 47th out of 50 states for the highest number of deficient bridges in the entire country.
But it’s not just bridges and roads where Aloha State infrastructure is slipping. In the most recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the state’s other critical infrastructure, including dams, stormwater and wastewater systems, drinking water, energy and aviation, all received poor or mediocre grades. Much of it has to do with asset lifecycles.
In the same way that graying Baby Boomers require more medical care, infrastructure is a financial liability that increases with age. It would require upwards of $231 billion per year, an amount greater than the annual gross domestic products of Vietnam, Portugal and New Zealand, to keep America’s existing road network in satisfactory condition. But total federal, state and local government spending on highways barely cracks the $100 billion threshold annually, less than half what engineers estimate is required to maintain a safe status quo. The projected funding shortfall for Hawaii’s roads will exceed $23 billion within two decades.
Barring solutions to fill the potholes in infrastructure funding, analysts expect the U.S. economy will hemorrhage $4 trillion in GDP and 2.5 million jobs by the year 2025. Individual families are estimated to lose $3,400 each year.
That delta between what Hawaii’s infrastructure needs require and what our government can reasonably appropriate helps explain the crumbling state of its infrastructure. Of course, there is an obvious common-sense solution: government doesn’t have to go it alone.
Public-private partnerships have been tested and applied across numerous critical sectors, including even medicine. Biomedical research, including the breakthroughs in spike proteins and antibody responses that underpin several U.S.-produced coronavirus vaccines, is routinely performed in partnership between private labs and the National Institutes of Health. This approach accelerates the cost-effective work and research of both the government and the private sector.
Public-private partnerships allow governments to concentrate on policy and regulation while empowering the private sector’s managerial and technical experts to find creative solutions to improve efficiency and customer service. For Hawaii taxpayers and consumers, it means a better and more cost-effective experience.
Updating our infrastructure is an economic imperative for the future. The longer the political stand-off over scope and sticker price continues, the older our roads and bridges become and the more economic activity we forfeit. If public-private partnerships are good enough for life-saving vaccines, the model is undoubtedly worthy to facilitate road paving, managing ports or railways, or digging tunnels and dikes.
The government doesn’t have to go it alone on infrastructure, and it shouldn’t.
———
Lawrence Slade is chief executive of the Global Infrastructure Investor Association, a group representing investors with $1 trillion of infrastructure assets under management.
