Third World America - Arianna Huffington [38]
On August 14, 2003, we got a glimpse of what we can expect a lot more of if we don’t make that investment.41 That muggy Thursday, an estimated fifty-five million Americans and Canadians living in a nearly four-thousand-mile stretch from Michigan to Connecticut and Canada lost power in the largest blackout in North American history. In New York, traffic ground to a halt when 11,600 stoplights cut out, and stalled subways and trains stranded four hundred thousand commuters throughout the evening and into the night. The city was plunged into darkness. The impact was felt across the northern corridor of our country, from high-rise elevators to airports and communication networks. What happened? Power lines, heavy from increased demand, dipped into overgrown trees in Ohio, which triggered a series of malfunctions that led to the shutdown of at least 265 power plants throughout the Northeast.42
ON THE ROADS TO RUIN
America’s roads are also in miserable shape, with a third of the country’s roadways rated “poor” or “mediocre.”43 Again, our demand has far outstripped our capacity to meet it. From 1980 to 2005, the miles traveled by cars increased 94 percent (for trucks, mileage increased 105 percent).44 Yet there was only a 3.5 percent increase in highway lane miles.
But you don’t need those numbers to know that our roads are badly congested. You see it—and experience it—every day. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Infrastructure Report Card, “Americans spend 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic at a cost of $78 billion a year—$710 a year for each motorist.”45 City drivers have it particularly bad: They are stuck in traffic over 40 percent of their time on the road.46
In studying car crashes across the country, the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC) determined that badly maintained or managed roads are responsible for $217 billion in car crashes annually—far more than headline-grabbing alcohol-related accidents ($130 billion) or speed-related pileups ($97 billion).47
But Americans are paying an even higher price for our deteriorating roads: According to the TCC, 53 percent of the forty-two thousand road fatalities each year are at least partially the result of poor road conditions.48 We are currently spending $70 billion annually on improving our highways—nowhere near the $186 billion a year that is needed.49 It’s a collision of need versus resources; for far too many of us, it can be fatal.
THE LONG AND GRINDING COMMUTE
There’s an additional twist on the traffic story. Over the past decade, high housing prices have forced many middle-class families to move farther and farther away from the overpriced cities they work in. Doing so has meant ever-longer commutes.
By the year 2000, each day, 3.5 million Americans headed out on “extreme commutes,” defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as travel times to and from work of three hours or more each day.50 That is twice the number of extreme commuters there were in 1990. One in eight workers—17.5 million Americans—are now out their front doors every morning and on their way to work by 6 A.M. For more and more of the middle class, life now consists of sleep, an arduous commute, work, another arduous commute, then back to sleep.51
These stressed-out Americans turbo-charge their long journeys to work with PowerBars, vats of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee … and loneliness. Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, found that there is a direct connection between the duration of a person’s commute and their sense of social isolation.52 By his calculations,