The deteriorating state of U.S. transportation systems has been the 10,000-pound gorilla in the room for a long time. As an Inside the Beltway-type once told me, “You don’t get elected by exciting voters about the infrastructure.”

There’s little need to alert readers of World Trade to the problem. If you’re a manufacturer or retailer shipping goods or a service provider moving them from one part of the country (or the world) to another, you already know too well about the declining physical state of U.S. facilities. Highways are badly congested. Railroads require major capital investments as freight volumes increase. Port expansion and modernization has lagged behind global competitors. 

True, there have been earnest efforts to rouse consciousness and mobilize opinion. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched an ambitious “Let’s Rebuild America.”

“We’re rapidly running out of capacity, and it’s already costing us jobs, productivity, competitiveness,” warned the group’s President Thomas Donahue in announcing the initiative two summers ago.

But good intentions aside, these have been relatively isolated voices, particularly in light of the magnitude of the crisis (the U.S. Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission estimates that $225 billion per year…Billion! Per Year!...needs to be spent until 2060).

Enter the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009!

I’ll leave it to those better schooled in the intricacies of public finance to parse out the virtues and vices of the $785 billion dollar stimulus. As somebody who studied economics when John Maynard Keynes was the gold standard, I vote for aggressive counter-cyclical spending as big and fast as possible. Regardless of where you stand on the bill itself, though, there’s few who can disagree with the priority placed on infrastructure.

In the first days after passage, you had to duck to get out of the way of press releases from all over the country announcing pending projects. “This is the day America starts back,” hailed Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. He spelled out the shopping list: modernize Amtrak, expand airport capacity, build and rehabilitate roads, bridges and ports. 

Missouri proudly claimed to be the first state to spend some its stimulus money, awarding a bid to repair a bridge in the Ozarks moments after President Obama signed the legislation. Washington State announced it would direct nearly $70 million for highways and bridges in Seattle; Florida identified $7 billion worth of projects ready to move forward.

Now, far be it from me to rain on anybody’s parade but a fundamental underlying concern has been lost in the flurry of activity. I’ve constantly been reminded by various sources that-while piecemeal repairs and improvements are welcome-what we really need is a comprehensive transportation master plan. Without a systematic overview of the optimal way to move people and products (and information!) over the next half-century, we limit the effectiveness of our investments.  

We risk spending on legacy systems and approaches that are likely to be unsustainable. It gives me pause that we are unleashing a locality-by-locality spending tsunami without a compelling countrywide approach. 

Without such national models and the leadership to implement them, I fear we may look back at this extraordinary opportunity for world-class infrastructure renewal with regret for what could have happened but didn’t because of old-school politics and industry lobbying. And a failure of vision!