Our Infrastructure Needs New Infrastructure
By Gaspar Anton
In November 2021, the U.S. Congress approved the Inflation Reduction Act, an infrastructure investment program with hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending. But how realistic is it to unleash this amount of firepower, all at once, and expect coordinated results? Is there a clear vision of what needs updating and in what order of priority? Does U.S. industry even have the means to drive transformation on this scale?
We believe there is a serious question mark over whether the necessary information exists - or is being collected rapidly enough - with which to make the right decisions and to implement them quickly and cost-effectively. In short, do we need new infrastructure to enable upgrading our existing infrastructure?
A trillion dollar challenge
One key driver that provoked the trillion dollar program is the perception that the U.S. is lagging behind economic competitors, particularly China.
U.S. infrastructure is widely accepted to be creaking, with safety concerns about structurally deficient bridges and health risks from antiquated drinking water and wastewater systems. Traffic congestion delays from inadequate and damaged roads cost the economy over $120 billion per year. And airports are struggling to keep up with demand. Delays and avoided trips cost the economy over $35 billion per year in an industry that supports 1.4 million jobs and generates hundreds of billions in tax revenue via international tourism.
Transformation optimism
In some ways, we are in a better position than ever to take on a task this big. Technology has the potential to cut infrastructure renewal down to size and deliver significant efficiency savings. IT now enables us to think and react at the scale necessary. Seeing how individual projects fit together and optimizing the overall impact should be possible using the power of supercomputers.
This is the transformative potential of new tech, offering an era of connectedness and insight that has previously been out of reach. On this optimistic reading, fully modernized infrastructure is right around the corner. What many of us would think of as “futuristic cities” are possible to build right now, in the present. In terms of technology, awareness, and excitement, we’ve got an evolutionary step-change in infrastructure development right at our fingertips.
The missing data
But few in the industry believe we are about to unlock this vision and its benefits any time soon. What’s missing is a coordinated program of data capture. In order to reduce waste, increase efficiency and usher in a connected built environment, we must first assemble the data that allows us to actually understand the challenges and opportunities.
One of the core problems is the sheer scale of the problem. There are over 4 million miles of road in the U.S. Making optimal decisions about what to do where requires detailed knowledge about road attributes such as area, width, markings, number of lanes, curves, inclines and declines. You obviously also need to capture road condition data (and update it regularly) about defects such as cracking, network cracking, edge defects, fretting, potholes, patching and weathering.
Now think about what’s on or next to the roads. Nobody actually knows how many road signs there are in the U.S., but a conservative estimate puts it at over 40 million. Now add in things like street lights, traffic lights, roadside cabinets and the like. And, for each of these, their precise location, condition, type and size. All this is well beyond the capabilities and budgets available for conventional manual asset management. Let alone the associated traffic chaos and safety concerns we get when human beings are sent out during lane closures to find out what is going on.
But it is entirely doable with existing automation technologies. IoT sensors, wearables, lidar-based AI-automated asset management, autonomous maintenance robots - these are not sci-fi but all technologies that are either in place or are ready to roll out today. What’s missing - perhaps because it does not sound dramatic enough - is a sustained program of automated asset management with which to understand and monitor the challenge.
The real issues
If the need is easy to identify, it’s not a question of flipping a switch and off we go.
Making sense of data across numerous platforms is central to infrastructure project design, maintenance, and longevity. The tech challenges include developing frameworks for real-time data sharing, and legal and cultural challenges such as determining the acceptable limits of data capture and the extent to which society is happy to rely on artificial intelligence. Some of these challenges need to be met by business, through the development of data sharing and storage technologies. But many require clear frameworks developed through legislation and other democratic processes.
It’s not a new challenge and government has already identified certain aspects of where progress is needed. In 2021, Gartner researchers predicted that over 50% of governments will have formal accountability structures for data sharing by 2023. IDC analysts were equally optimistic, predicting that with the growth of out-of-the-box data integration tools, 20% of all back-office data will be connected and utilized across departments to improve local government program administration by 2024. The same IDC analysts predicted that by 2026, 50% of mid-sized cities will use digital twins for efficiency improvements and to gather operational data to meet climate targets.
Which is all just as well, because these issues are only going to get more complex. Within the next decade, data volumes will be increasing in ways that are nearly unimaginable. Analysis and oversight, robotics, and the metaverse will all introduce data infrastructure challenges for which we are currently unprepared.
This is the best opportunity since the Eisenhower administration to give the U.S. an infrastructure that matches its global leadership status. Fortunately, it comes at a time when AI-derived geodata makes the task a practical undertaking and enables state and Federal authorities to build a comprehensive picture of what needs to be done and how to drive even greater efficiency for tax payers in the future.
While the new infrastructure bill is an important step, we need a lot more than a huge influx of cash.
About Gaspar:
Gaspar Anton is the founder and CEO of EyeVi Technologies. Gaspar has decades of experience with GIS systems, mapping, and imaging technologies, and he was instrumental in helping to build out Google Maps and Streetview in the Baltic region. In 2020, Gaspar founded EyeVi Technologies, combining his scientific expertise and entrepreneurial drive.
1. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/state-us-infrastructure
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183397/united-states-highway-mileage-since-1990/
5. https://goto.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1488705&tp_key=1a475164f8