Most of the U.S. infrastructure community cheered when the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), was enacted in 2021. After all, this country has a lot of deferred maintenance across many infrastructure sectors. In transportation, there’s a long list of obsolete bridges, obsolete bottlenecked interchanges, and overloaded freeways in fast-growing cities and states. What’s not to like about funding those types of projects?
Let me begin with the early-January 2023 announcement that the long-delayed Brent Spence Bridge project between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky, will receive $1.6 billion in federal grant funding. This long-needed project had been
