Even as it has become increasingly clear that the Amtrak horror in Philadelphia was caused by faulty driving rather than – say it with me – “America’s crumbling infrastructure,” the media have lit up with calls for increased federal spending on rail. In doing so, they frequently repair to our country’s “infrastructure report card,” as written by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
“A 2013 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the state of U.S. rail infrastructure a C+, slightly higher than the infrastructure grade for the nation as a whole (D+),” frets the New Republic. TNR is not alone in uncritically relaying the ASCE’s grade: CBS News, the Christian Science Monitor, and Slate, among others, have dutifully parroted the ASCE’s grade as if it were unimpeachable fact. Prominent people in the government also often cite the ASCE in pleading for more spending.
And yet what is rarely remarked on is that the ASCE has an inherent interest in claiming that the nation’s infrastructure is in desperate need of repair. As the Washington Post (notably!) put it in 2013, “the ASCE always gives U.S. infrastructure poor grades. From reading past reports, you’d get the impression that it’s a miracle the United States is even a functioning country.”
The ASCE is effectively an interest group (or, gasp, a lobby shop) that represents more than 100,000 civil engineers. Indeed, interestingly, the anti-car writer Charles Marohn lambasted the ASCE from the left about four years ago, calling its report card “propaganda.”
“ASCE releases a report that projects — in a completely bogus and inflated way — all of these damages that will be suffered if we don’t spend more money maintaining our highways,” wrote Marohn. “The unwritten premise of the report — that spending money on highways is ALWAYS a positive investment — is so strong that nobody even bothered to question the numbers.”
That the ASCE is effectively an industry-funded lobbying group is not proof that its report card is wrong, of course. But it would be nice if the same level of skepticism applied to, say, energy industry funded research on climate change, or tobacco industry funded research on lung cancer, was also applied to the ASCE’s ballyhooed report card.
