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Comment by tomlock | Hacker News Reader

After I looked at this page I immediately wondered who funded it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Civil_Engi...

An interesting read!

My main, and likely cynical take away from this however is that this is funded by people likely to benefit from an increase in infrastructure spending. This isn't exactly an unbiased view.

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While I normally welcome that train of thought, in this case I'm inclined to ask if they aren't also the leading experts to comment on this sort of thing? It certainly brings the conflict of interest evident in e.g. cable regulation vs. industry members, but in this case at least, the organization involved seems to have more in common with e.g. the ACM/IEEE, and as such I give them a little more leeway and am more than willing to look for logical arguments. Sure, always be aware of bias, but in this case, I'm glad that it's a professional society of civil engineers telling us how dire the civil engineering situation is; frankly I hear it as a common complaint in CS that we often don't have our expertise on our domain heard by those in power :)

Last week, my plumber told me how dire the situation was under the house. Even though he is an expert, I still got 2 other quotes.

I'm with you there! I'm glad this exists! But I think the ideal outcome across all the stakeholders would probably end up a compromise - because this is primarily about the Engineer's opinions, in my view.

Agreed, especially since important infrastructure categories like communications and financial/banking are absent. The categories which are listed closely follow the Millennium Challenge top 10, according to that Wikipedia page, they "had the greatest positive impact on life in the 20th century."

But are achievements of the 20th century likely to be exclusively the same ones driving the 21st century? These categories are certainly still critical, but is it an exhaustive list?

I don't think anybody denies infrastructure is important. Hillary Clinton's plan is to spend $275bn on infrastructure[1]. Donald Trump wants double that[2]. But if we're going to spend billions or trillions of dollars we might want to make sure it's thoughtfully allocated.

1. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/fixing-americas-infras... 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/us/politics/trump-clinton-...

Unlike interest groups with mysterious names like "Amercians for Families and Fuzzy Kittens", it's pretty obvious what an engineering society is advocating and why.

The facts are mostly in their favor. How many interstate overpass bridges are there? Most have 35 year lifespans, and most are older.

In my area (Albany, NY) the State is just wrapping up a 6 year project to retrofit a major bridge that was a sister of the I-35 bridge in Minnesota that catastrophically failed a few years ago -- before that event, it was known to be in rough shape and nothing was done.

Also in my city, a century old storm sewer just collapsed last week, swallowing an entire street, taking out a primary water main and gas main in the process.

This sort of infrastructure is decaying all over the place, and even when not failing catastrophically, it causes other issues. For example, current standards are to separate storm sewers from sanitary (i.e. Poop) sewers. Most older areas end up overflowing storm drains into both systems, overwhelming treatment plants and dumping untreated waste. Increased sprawl and pavement mean more storm water -- so local rivers and harbors are fouled all over the country.

On the other hand, the interest of the ASCEE and the American people are congruent. Bridges in the US seem in a very poor shape, compared to the rest of the First World. When did a thing like the I-35 bridge collapse last happen on the Old Continent? And even in Portugal the electricity doesn't routinely fail for several hours after a thunderstorm because they managed to bury their wires over there.

More often than you'd think, depends on how you judge the severity of these relative to the I-35 collapse, but on a human life scale there have certainly been many in the last couple decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures

I agree, for the most part. But the increase in tax or government spending is something that I feel like the taxpayer would likely not fully support! I think everyone wants better infrastructure, but not only better infrastructure.

This isn't exactly an unbiased view.

True, but one thing to consider is that engineers and construction workers can make a lot more money performing emergency repairs (replacing a bridge that has just collapsed or fixing a broken water main) compared with a run-of-the-mill rehab or new project.

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