I expect a lot of people around the country are thinking that I-95 being severed for several weeks is going to be a huge catastrophe. Probably not as much as you think, because I-95 in Philadelphia is a spur from the main east coast highway. People hauling good or their asses from New York and points north to Baltimore and points south depart I-95 in Mansfield, New Jersey and continue south on the New Jersey Turnpike, then connecting with I-295 and ultimately rejoining I-95 in Delaware. So I-95 in Pennsylvania carries mostly relatively local Philadelphia area traffic. That will be a major PITA for the area, but not such a huge blow to interstate commerce beyond the Philadelphia area. Why the architects of the highway system chose to designate the roads in that way I cannot say, but I'm guessing that stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike was built later.
Anyway, you don't care about that, but what you probably do care about is the extent of our dependence on highly interconnected human built infrastructure. Compound this scenario by severing I-295 in, say, Collins Park, Delaware and we'd really be hurting. I'm not going to spin out other scenarios, you can exercise your own imaginations. But it wouldn't take a foreign enemy with an air force to seriously mess us up. I'd say we've actually gotten lucky so far.
Excuse me: I didn't say anything about failure to maintain the bridge or I-95 in general. I'm just talking about the vulnerability of infrastructure. Whether we're doing enough to assure the safe transport of gasoline is probably a question worth asking, but I didn't ask it here. Of course, in the future, one hopes, we won't be transporting gasoline at all.
1 comment:
My understanding is that the enemy is within: failure to maintain infrastructure. And of course, a country that logically would benefit from mass absolutely refuses to develop it because profit.
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