I seldom receive as much response to a column as last week’s on Oahu’s poor road conditions, and the mayor and governor would be wise to take note of the passions this issue arouses among citizens.
Readers, many of whom are well informed on the matter, have abundant opinions on why local roads are in such bad shape: maintenance funds diverted to other purposes, cheap and inferior materials, outdated technology, poor training, inadequate preparation of roadbeds before paving, too-thin layers of blacktop.
And they have stories of successes elsewhere: a machine in Los Angeles that quickly does durable pothole repairs by remote control, a badly damaged road in the Fukushima earthquake fixed in only six days, a road in Azerbaijan completely paved in three hours, rainy cities filling potholes with rubberized asphalt made from old tires.
One reader likes to "fly" over cities of the world using Google Earth and is impressed by the near-perfect condition of heavily traveled streets.
It seems the city and state — or a public-spirited private organization — should gather a crack working group to identify why our roads crumble and the best practices we could borrow from other cities to improve our record.
The most sobering item passed along by a reader, however, was a report from the London School of Economics Growth Commission questioning whether democracies are capable of competently managing major infrastructure.
As Clive Crook of Bloomberg News summarized the findings, "The management of public infrastructure projects has been lamentable. No private firm could survive the errors that governments have made with taxpayers’ money.
"One multinational review of infrastructure projects …found that 9 out of 10 transport-infrastructure projects (across 20 countries and five continents) suffered cost overruns; benefits, on the other hand, were systematically exaggerated."
The problem is the inherent politics in a democracy: the inability to look beyond short-term political pressures to long-term infrastructure needs, the temptation to divert funding to sexier projects, the prevalence of pork barrel prioritizing in which "you support my worthless project and I’ll support yours."
The London group recommended freeing infrastructure decisions from shifting political winds by turning infrastructure management over to independent boards that would decide priorities, strategy and financing, subject to oversight by Parliament.
Locally, that would mean setting up agencies similar to the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation to manage roads and other major infrastructure with a degree of separation from politics.
But after the tepid reception given HART and the outright hostility directed at the Public Land Development Corp., the question is whether a suspicious public would support handing so much power to an agency so far removed from political reach.
If we ever want our roads fixed, we might have to.
