Comments on "Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure"

My name is Darrlynn Franklin and I am a technical writer for MidAtlanitcBroadband a telecommunications company in Chantilly, VA. I would like the opportunity to read the infrastructure challenges communities in America are facing. I would also like to know your recommendations on how to fix the challenges these communities face.

Now is the time to provide incentives to employers to discount homes for workers near where they work. This will cut down on commute, traffic, pollution, accidents, travel time. Maximize workforce hours, family time. Do this now while economy is down and everyone has to move anyway. Less commuting may even mean families won't need a second or third car.

This is not an engineering problem. This is an institutional problem. The infrastructure problem in the US is that public infrastructure providers do not recover costs, do not send the right price signals to end users and do not fund depreciation of fixed assets. We cannot engineer our way out of the problem until we fix the institutional problems that are the root cause.

The world's most urgent infrastructure need is a network of communication for aid, humanitarian, and rescue agencies. Soon after disasters strike, road and electronic communication channels break, making it very difficult for rescue agencies to help the victims. Engineering special networks which can be still operational after disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes should be given a global priority. As the world hurtles relentlessly towards climate change, natural calamities are likely to become more frequent and widespread. Depending on currrent format of infrastructural development will lead to high death tolls and economic losses in such a situation. Special communication networks will be able to avert these.

Water infrastructure is the most urgent need in terms of infrastructure on a global, regional & local level! Access to clean water as well as waste water treatment are essential and will continue to grow in importance not only in developing countries but also in the western hemisphere. Water efficiency is an integral part of the mentioned issues.

May seem off-topic, but: If I were king, day one would be setting up the innovation infrastructure to get to the optimal solutions, then make the comparisons. Reading through these posts, I'm inspired, educated by them, but still innactive. 7 billion human brains and and internet. We should be building serious corroboration infrastructure right now. Any sign of it at our level? Blogs? No. More like: Filter nastiness into the bilge-page: check, but could be automated without too much AI and then self-moderated via personal filter. Turn redundant ideas into a vote. Votes on ideas are not just Yes, No, but rate intelligence, reliability of presented data, Agree/Disagree, etc. Turn good adeas into an illucidated modifiable presentation, all languages. Informal connection to actuators in government is automatic.. Right now that place is taken up by news media and polls? Yikes. Let's put or heads together. On the aforementioned population decrease idea: Reliability of info 99.9 Agree: 99.9

yes wait for a plague to kill enough people to make the 50's come back, no wait, everyone take a number and lets exterminat 9 out of ten, wait lets just let the richest 10 percent survive. Engineering new solutions is the only way to elevate the billions living in poverty while retaining the standard of living the first world has been acustomed to, maybe testing nuclear weapons in arizona is the answer as long as we don't allow the current residents to leave first. Essential the solution for the USA is to encourage people to live closer to work but that will entail some conter intuitive reasoning because like most humans our long term self interest remains tertiary to the immediate needs and wants.

Unfortunately, the entire idea of urban civilization as we know it is a cancerous meme which must be destroyed before it destroys us. We already have too many humans and their associated food production systems. Our PRIME need is to establish a self-sustaining off-Earth presence in order to ensure species survival. At that point the resources of the Earth are dwarfed to insignificance by the resources of the Solar System. While the Earth is fragile and undergoes major disturbances on a regular basis, the Solar System is larger and undergoes similar disruptions on a much longer time scale. Eventually, we must spread beyond the Galaxy, as galaxies too undergo major truama. One of these scenarios is extremely likely within the next 100 years: 1) Climatary warming melts the ice caps, or worse, causes the ice to calve into the ocean in massive amounts, causing multiple global tsunami a hundred meters high. 2) The ice-free Arctic Ocean destabilizes the ocean currents and the climate, and brings on an ice age/accelerates global warming. 3) Global warming frees methane from the sea floor by the billions of tons and greatly increases the global temperature, while destroying a majority of humans and a large number of other species will go extinct. As far as our major needs, we screwed up on things and may not have recovery time anymore. Had we built soloar power satellites starting in the '70's when we knew it was feasible both economically and as engineering, we sould now be generating 120% of the US electrical power with only minor pollution and the waste heat that results from any energy conversion. We didn't. We've known that our profligate energy use was unsustainable for the past 70 years, and yet we continued. While fossil fuel reserves have been underestimated (as we have continually discovered new reserves,) they were always to valuable as raw materials to break them down for their energy content. It should be possible to refine (break down) our waste hydrocarbon plastics into small hydrocarbons used for feed stock to plastics and fuel production. But we have allowed even our existing refineries to fall into disrepair instead of developing this technology as a waste recycling system. The meme which promotes the stratification of society and encourages the hoarding of vital resources even at the expense of the lives of people who need them, is like a cancer on the earth. We have for centuries made major impacts upon our environment without giving any thought or energy to dealing with the negative results. This is the main reason we are in the mess we are in today. Our current population of humans is several times larger than the Earth can comfortably support while supporting the other species. Since the entire biosphere is a redundantly linked system with self-repairing capabilities, in the long run this doesn't mater to the biosphere. But it does not bode well for the future of humans as a species. As to local infrastructure, we plan poorly, many major decisions are made on the basis of lobbying by developers and contractors. Seldom are these decisions made with careful cost benefit analysis of their effects. The prime motivator is usually who will make money. This is because the political process, as applied to such issues doesn't place any emphasis upon long-term effects, but seldom looks beyond the next election. Decisions that are supposed to be made for the good of the people are made instead based upon the good of the lobbyists. The current US situation is an ideal example. Having blown all of the country's credit, indebted to the point that the idea of repaying it in less than a century is ludicrous, the politicians have, once again, borrowed money to 'give' to the population in order to hide the inevitable recession/depression for long enough for the politicians to be re-elected. By delaying the official start of the recession by 1 fiscal quarter, they have ensured that the country won't know that it is in a recession officially until January 2009. The people we elected to serve our interests have not served our interests as a first priority in a very long time, perhaps for ever. Most industries until recently, made the bulk of their profits by not paying for the environmental damages that they have caused. But environmental damage, while self-healing to an extent, is not robust or rapid healing enough to withstand the amount of damage which our species is capable of inflicting within a short enough time span to save us from the effects of the damage. What we have refused to pay for for centuries cannot be repaired with legal maneuvers--this bill MUST BE PAID! At least, if we expect to survive at all. At this point, baring a technological breakthrough, we could perhaps make a dent in fixing our damage, and we must do so, but a full solution will probably involve a massive die-back of the species to reduce the impact and free enough resources for the remainder to repair and build systems of memes to prevent such a tragedy from happening in the future. S.L. Goodsell (previous comment) has a reasonable short term solution by using the underground for our population, we can free up large areas of surface for cultivation of food and still have space to put aside for nature. Of course, mono culture of food is both inefficient and dangerous, so we should make changes in how we produce and distribute food too. It is not, however, a long-term solution, as it will not survive any of the projected major disasters that the planet faces. Hawking is almost correct. But Steven makes the wrong assumption that the species needs planetary bodies to live upon, which is not true. However, once we are living in space, we can easily process resources in the Solar System for use, including the immense amount of solar energy available within the Earth-Luna system. The circumlunar system intercepts solar energy within a circle 500,000 miles in diameter, the Earth intercepts solar light in a circle 8,000 miles in diameter, and then only after it is filtered through several miles of air, dust, and water vapor. Circumlunar space intercepts 1.966,187,500 square miles of solar energy. The Earth intercepts solar energy over 50,384,000. sq miles. Collecting in space makes the energy production facilities more difficult to destroy or capture, takes far less ground area than ground based solar, and can use either a heat engineer direct conversion to electricity. The electricity can be used to manufacture fuels, thus eliminating the need to harvest carbohydrates which could be used for food or fossil hydrocarbons which are wasted by burning and produce major pollution problems. Additionally, once we are established in space, hydrocarbons are not in short supply as there are many Earth masses of such material in the Solar System.

A shortage of water in South Australia will affect our way of life and with out a solution no future development can continue. We need to look at channeling water that flows into the sea from the Kimberly Mountain range, in the Northern Territory, down south. This would not be as difficult as it sounds as there are many natural waterways that are dry except in the wet, that could be used. With a lake or dam above Lake Eyre, so it won't flow into it and become salt. The infrastructure of pipe lines is in place from there down. But the water will need to be pumped south instead of north like it is now. Maybe this sounds like a hare-brained scheme but what is the alternative? Margaret

A shift towards more accessible and more efficient (and just more) public transportation would benefit the country and indirectly the rest of the world significantly. Not only would there be a noteworthy reduction in the amount of energy used (and not to mention CO2 produced) to move people from place to place, but the way we occupy our space would change as well. That is, urban sprawl would decline as people gradually moved to places in close proximity to public transport. This would benefit not only by sparing the land that would otherwise be gobbled up by cities expanding outward, building more homes which are only accessible by car but would also benefit the places people live in, as we shift where we live back to the quintessential neighborhood where people actually walk on the sidewalks. The convenience of the car, although attractive, has hurt our environment, our health and our day-to-day lives as social beings. Reverting back to public transportation, as Americans did before the economic boom of the last fifty years, is a more responsible and sustainable and - despite the convenience and allure of cars - pleasant way to live. Engineers and decision makers should act upon this.