The State of Our Infrastructure
By Henry Petroski
National and state report cards are one measure of progress or decline.
This Article From Issue
September-October 2017
Volume 105, Number 5
Page 274
Eight years ago in this column (September–October 2009), I wrote on America’s infrastructure and efforts to employ metrics of a sort to assess its condition. As I noted then, a landmark effort was included in the 1988 document entitled Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works, which was issued by the congressionally chartered National Council on Public Works Improvement (NCPWI), which used the then-common term “public works” for what we now so familiarly call “infrastructure.” Fragile Foundations included a so-called report card, which assigned letter grades in eight categories, including Highways, Mass Transit, Aviation, Wastewater, and Hazardous Waste. The grades ranged from B to D, meaning good to poor, with an average grade of C, for mediocre.
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