»In which we age, and the country with us

Nicolai Ourousoff had a great piece in today's New York Times about American's failing infrastructure, as shown by the failures of recent technology in New Orleans. The last paragraph was especially moving:

Already, some have voiced a fear that this is the city that we will be left with - a Creole Disneyland, reduced to its traditional boundaries, surrounded by a sea of decay and poverty. Sitting in the dark outside his restaurant one recent evening, an entrepreneur suggested that this might be ideal. He joked that the flooded neighborhoods should be transformed into golf courses.

Such cynicism has been reinforced by the government's disastrous response to the storm, when the Superdome was famously transformed into a teeming refugee camp. Clearly, the pump operator's America - the America built by people like Wood and Mulholland - is an anachronism.

Today, the true descendants of these visionaries are more likely to be working in the Netherlands or Spain than in a major American city. Bilbao, for example, may have gained cultural cachet from the success of its Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum. Yet the strongest evidence of the city's enlightened planning is the enormous investment it made in a new high-tech subway system designed by the British architect Norman Foster. It's hard to imagine a similar undertaking in an American city today, especially when the federal government seems more concerned about doling out private contracts than reversing decades of neglect. The challenge we face is not just about infrastructure. It's about reknitting the connective tissue that binds us into a functioning society. This cannot be accomplished by retreating into a haze of denial; what's needed is an honest acknowledgment of what's brought us here. New Orleans was a warning.

A similar viewpoint comes from the Ball State Daily News, which notes that not only has the United States failed to make advances in maglev train technology, but also in spreading the gospel of Wi-Fi. Both problems devolve to policy issues: imagine spending five years plodding through the government bureaucracy which constrains the $1bln allocated to a magnetic-levitation project, only to have one's proposal reach "draft" status. Wikipedia has an illustrated entry on Magnetic Levitation trains which details the underlying technology and current implementations.