Chris Kelly: Thanks for coming. My name is Chris Kelly, I am with Booz Allen and it's my pleasure to be the moderator of this morning for I think a topic that should prove very interesting, "Global Infrastructure Fatigue: A Time To Rebuild or Reinvest?" And you know, this topic is interesting to me because for all of my professional career I have been involved in infrastructure analysis, whether it be, communications, energy, electric power or the like. And over the course of last two years I have had a lot of opportunity to travel around the world and experience the benefits of infrastructure and experience the problems when it doesn't work. And it seems to me that this idea of infrastructure fatigue and the topic we are going to talk about today is something that's at a slow simmer and then going to be a rapid boil. And something that if we don't pay attention to, it's going to come home to roost. So today we have a really good panel I think to talk about this topic and bring a number of different perspectives. As is typically the case with these kinds of sessions, I will introduce the panel members and then I will ask them each in turn to say some remarks. And then we will begin to have a dialogue up here with some Q&A and some questions around, their particular points of view. And then on and around quarter over ten of ten, we will open up the dialogue to bring everybody else into it. And if there is something that's kind of on your mind or you really want to bring it sooner, raise your hand, that's probably okay too, we will let that go. It's not a problem. But there will be microphones set up for all of you to use and interact with the panel. So let me start with the introductions, and start from farthest to near. And we are going to go in opposite order. This morning we are very lucky to have with us Orville Schell, Orville is professor and
Chris Kelly: Dean for the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California, Berkeley. Orville spends and has spent a lot of his professional life looking at Asia and issues in Asia around infrastructure, environment, culture, people, economics and writing about that. Orville has written over 14 books and has a great deal of insight and I think will I think present to us what's happening in China on this topic and how do we need to think about it. And how do we relate it to; or where we are today in the United States. Next to him, I am pleased to introduce David Cicilline. David is the Mayor of Providence Rhode Island and he is been reelected in 2006 and now serving his second term, first elected in 2002. And David is overseeing a major transformation of that city; urban renewal, where crime rates are dropping and education is increasing and his ability to attract resources for redevelopment are critical to its success. So we will be interested to hear for really the local perspective the city prospective, where a lot of us actually feel the effects of infrastructure challenges on the ground. And then next to David, is my good friend and colleague Gary Schulman, who is also at Booz Allen. Gary has been in the transportation business for over 25 years and has actually worked on projects around the world to improve rail and roads and transportation and congestion. In addition he has worked on studies for and mobilization opportunities with the Olympics. So he has got a lot of practical experiences about what works on the ground and how you bring these things together. So what I have asked the group to do is I am going to start with Gary and ask him to kick off the conversation and I am going to just move down the line and then I have got some questions that I have got for the panelists. And it's based on the discussion dialogue will go where we need to go. Okay, Gary?
Gary Schulman: All right, thanks Chris, I am told to talk a little bit about transportation in the US today. Kind of how we got into the bind that we were in with our infrastructure and its deterioration, some of the challenges we face today, and then you know since this is the Aspen Ideas Festival, talk about some of the ideas from the future. Some of which are our own and some of which we are borrowing from other parts of the world. I personally had some issues last night with our transportation infrastructure getting here, through the some air traffic control issue my flight out of Boston was late and I missed the connection in Denver and I had to drive here. And I realized then I finally made it, but I realized that you know as I was driving along the road to the mountains, I was on the highway, on one side there was a railroad on the other. And I realized that the railroad was really one of the first big public private partnerships between the government of the United States about a 150 years ago and the private railroads. I think that I am not sure who owns that particular line; I think it's the UP, but it operates and you know, when you think about how this country was developed; our transportation infrastructure was critical. The government basically gave Indians land away to you know the private railroad companies and they said; build us a railroad build some towns along it and go to the west. And a lot of the growth in this nation, certainly in the late 1800's was due to our transportation infrastructure. Later I guess you know, basically after World War II, we put the Interstate Highway System in the place and we also built an airport and air traffic control system to handle the Jet age. And so we have had a lot of and you know for the last 50 years, that transportation infrastructure has been one of the things that has driven the US economy and made us the world great power. But in the last, probably 20 to 30 years, we have started [0:06:27] [Audio Break] our infrastructure. A lot of it's aging now. And the Interstate Highway System basically dates from the 1960's and the design standards that was built to were from 1960's. The airports and our air traffic control system date form the dawn of the Jet age. A lot of it runs on vacuum tube technology. And our mass transit systems as you know, and our intercity passenger rail leave a lot to be desired when compared to the rest of the world. They don't have the same model share, they don't have the same speed, they don't have the same dependability. And that comes about for a number of reasons which may be we will get to later. But one other issue is we did such a good job in the 50's and 60's building our infrastructure, then we started to forget about it. The country had other priorities; we had a war in Vietnam. We had new social programs that came out of the Johnson Administration. We had a Cold War that we had to win. And in the last five or six years, we have had this War on Terror. So transportation infrastructure kind of takes a backseat unless it has something to do with another program. So our biggest challenge, I think in this country, because of the way we have organized, again goes back to our constitutional set up, is there is really no integrated land use planning and transportation planning. Different parts of the government, different parts of the state local agencies, each do their own things with respect to transportation and land use planning. And it's partly just because of the nature of the legal systems we have. One of the things that's if any of you have ridden on the Channel Tunnel, from London to Paris, you will notice that the trains are going to England; they kind of go like this, kind of they respect private property rights to a great degree and it takes forever to get you know; somebody's property. As soon as you go across the channel and you get to the French side it's literally a straight line to Paris. And if it dissected somebody's carrot field well, you know, that was the price to pay the guy pay and is part of the you know, helping the state, and the state reimbursed them. But those things weren't put in the way. And some of questions people ask me, so then why why can't we have the high speed trains like the Shinkansen on the North East Corridor; and the answer is the civil infrastructure just doesn't allow it. The curves are too steep, just too sharp and it's as fast as you can go around the curve without throwing people through side of the vehicle and there is just nothing we can do about it except to buy a lot of expensive land to straighten the alignment. But I also want to mention just because we seem to have these issues with deteriorating infrastructure and congestion today doesn't mean that our government did anything wrong. I mean for the last 50 years we have asked the government; federal government in particular to focus on safety. And that's an incredible record. The chances of any of us dying in a commercial airline crash today are one in 53 million flights. I mean that's an incredible record. And when you put that up against the fact that our air traffic control system is deteriorating and the airlines are basically bankrupt and cutting back on all kind of costs including maintenance; that's an incredible statistic and the same is true with our highway infrastructure. It's pretty constant now that 40,000 people a year die in auto accidents. But when you think about the growth in vehicle miles travel that's a pretty remarkable statistic. And every year the actual rate of injuries continues to decrease, so we have done something right. And it's just in the last five or six years as we kind of reached capacity on many of our transportation systems that we have asked the government; particularly the Federal Government and many times state local politicians to start worrying about congestion and a deteriorating impact of our infrastructure. The big problem that we are having and we are going to have in the next five years is all these systems start to reach capacity at the same time. And if you remember from college, in queuing analysis, as things as systems go for like 95 to 96 to 97 to 98 percent capacity, things starts to deteriorate really quickly because each event has another event. It's kind of like the domino effect. And so if you can cut back a little bit on capacity it makes a big difference in how much congestion you have. I remember I was living in Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympics, and there was a panic about total freeway gridlock during the Olympics. And they tried to get everybody to stay home, go on vacation, don't travel at peak times. And I drove out there on the freeways you know, to some of these events and the traffic was flowing better than it ever had. And what they had done was all they had done after the fact and some analysis; they cut five percent of the traffic volume off. But that five percent at the margin made a tremendous difference in how fast every body else could go. So let me just get to some of the challenges of the future. From 1980 to 2000, the lane miles you know, lane miles on the freeways in the US increased five percent. Truck and automobiles doubled. In the next 20 years, the car traffic, automobile traffic is forecast to grow, you know just because of the population growth and our increasing wealth and the fact that everybody in their teenage gets a car, traffic is supposed to grow two and a half percent and truck traffic three percent. So it's something that if we don't take care of, it's going to have significant impact on our national economy. From 1980 to 2000, the cost of moving freight decreased from 16 percent of our gross domestic product to ten percent. If that trend starts to reverse; because all the truckers are sitting in the traffic jams and all our trains are tied up around some interlockings in Chicago. It doesn't bode well for the continued growth of the economy, because the six percent of the gross domestic product is a lot of money. And we also need to spend a lot of money going into the future, the estimate of what it will take, just to maintain our Interstate Highway System. The old 52,500 miles Interstate Highway System that President Eisenhower proposed, is $75 billion by 2020 and for many state and local governments and even the Federal Government that's a lot of money. That's for not building new or adding; that's just maintaining what we have. Same is true on aviation network. In next 20 years the passenger demand is going to increase between two or three times. We are not going to add two or three times as many airports or runways and we are certainly not going to add two to three times as many air traffic controllers using 1960's RADAR. So we have a major challenge there. And - before I kind of wrap up with some of the solutions, two other major I think, wild cards in transportation infrastructure; one, what's going to happen if there is some type of terrorist event to the transportation infrastructure? It's a kind of unknown what happens if somebody blows up a bus or shoots them on an airplane with a guided missile. What does that do and how does that change the focus of what we do in terms of funding and our priorities for transportation infrastructure. And the second thing has kind of evolved in the US in last years is the issue of the carbon footprint and emissions, not just from high altitude planes but just everybody. And as automotive technology evolves, what does that do to our infrastructure, not just transportation but our electrical infrastructure? It's the hybrid goes from the hybrid we have now, a Toyota Prius, to a plug-in hybrid, what does that do to the requirements for our you know energy infrastructure, if everybody is plugging in their hybrid every night. So those are kind of two big things you know, the answers are evolving. May be at this conference, it will be discussed in other sessions. There are a lot of problems out there but there are also a lot of solutions. And transportation getting people to work in the morning; as good as we are at building the finest military aircraft and somewhat in the internet and computer networks; there is a lot that the Americans can learn from the rest of the world in terms of getting people to work. Concepts of bus rapid transit come out of some of the you know, poorer cities in South America. But they work here just as well. And there are really only two ways that you are going to fix this problem. That means you can think back on Economics 101. You can increase the supply which is very expensive or you can reduce the demand which is very politically challenging, because you got to decide who gets the use of system and who doesn't, and how do you ration it, by price or by quantity. But there are other ideas coming from around the world. I will just mention a couple of them. Congestion pricing it's a big topic, it's been done in London, it's been done in Singapore and it was studied in Stockholm, the population voted for it. It's going to be studied in the US, its going to be it's been looked at in places like San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta and New York to have the densest core we would actually charge people to drive into the inner-city. A lot of social equity issues around it. The technology's there, it's easy to do things like easy pass. But how much do you pay and what's the real impact? And how do you make it part of a broader program to fix the transportation infrastructure? Public Private Partnerships that was a popular word a year or two ago here. But I think what has happened is they sort to got a bad name. And so people associate Public Private Partnerships with foreign banks and investment companies buying up American assets like the Indiana Toll Road or the Program of the New Jersey Turnpike that just fell apart. But there is really a broad range of Public Private Partnerships that are not really selling our assets to foreigners. There are everything from outsourcing to new ways to finance, to working together and to get over the old adversarial relationship between the government and the private contractors where one's a regulator and one's a regulatee, you kind of have to find ways to work together and solve problems and government has to accept the fact that that the private entities are should make a profit. And the private entities have to understand the role of the government to regulate, to protect the interest of the public. The third area is technology deployment. A lot has happened in the last couple of years with the speed and cost of wireless technology. And these the systems that we need are out there today. The technology exists to track all our planes with GPS instead of ground radar; its there. And the technology exists to track your car with GPS instead of nothing. Well a lot of issues come up, especially with your private car, like privacy. And who in the government is going to protect your privacy? Do you want the Government to know exactly where you have been, which hotel you stopped at, where you buy your food, etc everyday and they charge you based on what time you are on the road, and yet other other countries are doing it. In England, insurance companies are voluntarily letting people put GPS on their car depending on where they drive and what time they drive and how fast they drive. The get a discount on insurance and a lot of people have signed up for it and just don't mind their insurance company, not the government but a private insurance company, having this data on them. There are two I just in closing say, there are two big programs that are ongoing with US government finally after many years. One is called Next Gen ATS or Air Transportation System. The biggest component is to replace our aging vacuum tube air traffic control system with modern technology and to do away with the ground stations and to use GPS technology, so each plane is like a probe in the system just like your cell phone is a probe. And each plane knows where every other plane is in the vicinity. A lot of big political issues with that. The business model is probably the biggest. Who owns it; who operates it, what's the role of the government, how do you increase R&D spending by the Lockheed's and the Raytheon's and the folks who want to provide this technology. And what you do with the jobs of all the air traffic controllers and how do you retrain them? One of the big issues coming up with the air traffic infrastructure that not everybody realizes is that many of the air traffic controllers have hired in, in 81' when President Reagan fired the other ones. They are all coming up for retirement at the same time. And how we are going to deal with this and changing over to technology concurrently. And the last point is you know, even with the Highways the Federal Highway Administration has a big program starting. It's called VII Vehicle Infrastructure Integration. And it's to allow automobiles to talk to other automobiles and automobiles to talk to the way side the traffic lights, stop signs. And so if somebody if somebody's car is sliding on the ice 500 yards ahead you, it can warn you that you know there is an ice patch ahead. And there are a lot of commercial applications too. But again it's a business model issue; who pays for it, what are the role of selling your companies, what are the roles that people who want to advertise in that box that fits in your dash board. And you know, what's the role of the Government in deploying this technology? So there is lot of lot of opportunities out there and I think that there is you know, a great deal of hope for the future. But I think the issues I think one of the questions in here is that issues are not really technology, the issues are institutional. Who owns the data, who controls it, who minds it, who operates the systems and how they get paid for it, and how do we encourage cooperation between government and industry to fix the the transportation infrastructure program. So that's it has probably took more than my three minutes I am sorry.
David Cicilline: You are from the Government, you can do that.
Gary Schulman: No no, I am not from the government, I am from...
David Cicilline: Well, I think I was asked to give sort of the perspective of the city, as a Mayor of a city, of the urgency of this infrastructure conversation and I begin by saying that, I think part of my role here is really to sort of underscore how important this issue is for at least cities in this country and cities really all over the world. When there are serious infrastructure challenges you know, some terrible emergency like a bridge collapse, as you know a highway collapse or any of those kind of things, the focus of that is the city and it's the local government that really has to address those issues. And so we are the recipient or the the agency within the government that has a responsibility of addressing the failing infrastructure in American cities and I can tell you that Mayors in the US councils, Mayors, which represents over thousand miles across America, have identified infrastructure as one of our top priorities. So we put together a 10 point plan, for strong family, strong cities, for strong America and infrastructure as one of those 10 points. And I really use it as a template talk to Presidential candidates, and others about the importance of infrastructure. So it's important to cities obviously. Second thing I want to say is that the condition of the infrastructure in our country is dismal at best. The American Society of Civil Engineers does a report card, for America every year and we vconsistently get D's, C minuses and actually get worse. They estimate that we need to spend $1.6 trillion just to sustain a failing infrastructure, not even get it to where we want to. So its a huge problem; getting worse every year and has the most direct impact on American cities where we are seeing now, depending on who you believe, 90 percent of the American economy happens in metropolitan areas, a growing percentage of Americans are living in cities and more are moving to cities. So we can only expect that the consequences of a failing infrastructure are actually going to be even more seriously felt by a greater number of Americans and probably people around the world. So I think it's in that context that this conversation about infrastructure is really important. I think that as a baseline it's also really important to remind ourselves that the infrastructure in cities particularly is really essential to the creation of wealth and to the organization of the civil society, and peoples ability to get water and get electricity and get around is sort of one of the basic requirements of civil order and wealth creation. And it's really an essential ingredient for that. And so we have I think a history of having made huge public investments, in the kind of infrastructure we have in cities, almost exclusively through public funds, and I think now as we look in the next century of what we are facing and of the in ability of the government, both the Federal and State and City governments to really generate the resources to do it; we have to start thinking about what are the ways to bring resources and innovation and energy to this work. And I think the first thing we can do is, as Mayors and other leaders, is really underscore the urgency of doing this work. I think we don't talk about infrastructure a lot. And we in cities if you for example part of it is also when we build infrastructure, we also don't maintain it and if you look at the deferred maintenance budgets of state and city governments around this country you will see and I don't know this for sure, but I would bet you that you would see deferred maintenance budgets having been significantly decreased over the last 10 years, because when you build the school, if you are going to have lay off or fire 50 teachers; everyone will feel that and see it and the political consequences that are enormous. But if you cut your maintenance budget in half, people don't see that, at least immediately. And there has been a sustained reduction of the maintenance budgets that support infrastructure, not just in schools but in infrastructure in all different ways throughout the cities, very substantial over the last decade. And so as a consequence even the investments we are making are not being protected or sustained because we are not making investments and sustaining it. And so I think; confronting this issue and saying; it's important to cities, we are spending a lot of money on it. We ought to be sustaining it and protecting it as an important point to raise. But I think we are also seeing a lot of conversations, which I hope we can have today about who should own this infrastructure, how should it happen? I mean it was always the case that government built the roads, and now there are series of different kinds of potential models out there in which we can have the benefit of the private sector, which was presumably more entrepreneurial, more flexible, can attract capital and return on investment in a different way, but yet also have the government be a partner in it so that they can decide whether the government can decide where roads need to be built. It won't be totally driven by profit or where bridges need to be built. But this kind of this intersection between the public and the private sector in a way that brings resources and entrepreneurial spirit and then genuine creativity to the building and sustaining of infrastructure in a way that we didn't have to do frankly for the first infrastructure that we got in this country. But I think we can really benefit from that now. I think the other thing is that we are living in this kind of post September 11th world in which our crumbling infrastructure presents particular dangers to us, because the notion that we could be the victim of some sort of terrorist attack on a weak or failing infrastructure or on a unprotected infrastructure has much more consequences, so we need to be using that reality as a way to focus attention and energy and creative thinking about sustaining and building our infrastructure. And also our environmental issues, we the urgency of doing this is no longer it's just sort of inconvenient to get around American cities, but that there are environmental costs real costs which we can now quantify. And there are lots of good models out there that actually quantify the cost of not doing this and what we are doing to our environment and what we are doing in terms of our energy consumption, that we are not going to have the benefit of you know, plentiful and cheap oil to fuel our kind of infrastructure system, and in fact some would say, we don't have it any more. But that that really is going to require us to be a lot smarter and more creative, about how we move people around and how we sustain infrastructure in American cities. So these forces I think are going to contribute to this. I am thinking and I think we just have to look at a time when we are seeing real reductions, if you look at the kind of investments that are made, particularly at the Federal and State levels over the last six years, there has been real disinvestments in American cities on almost everything but particularly on infrastructure and resources that are necessary for the building of infrastructure, say whether it's water or roads or mass transit. And so the problem is becoming more urgent, the investment is declining and more people are moving to the cities. So it's sort of a perfect storm for a huge problem if we don't figure this out. And I think mayors are the individuals who are faced with the reality of people living in their cities that are not able to get around or that don't have electricity or that are having difficulties getting access to good quality water and sort of so I think we have to lead the conversation about how we align the government sectors, the Federal, State, City, County, governments and how we align with the private sector and the business community, the corporate community, foundations people who more interested in these issues, so that we align this work and begin to address these issues in a serious way and I can tell you in closing that, this is a real issue to residents of cities. In my city we did a resident satisfaction survey when I first took office, as a way to you know, develop a baseline and about what needed to be done and asked what was the single most important issue. And as a Mayor you think well, that will be education and that will be economic development, job creation, the number one issue in that survey and it's not uncommon in cities around the country, is road condition, which was startling to me, but it really was that people expected their local government to at least take care of the basics of being able to get around and not feel like you are you know, a country that had been sort of hit by war, something I mean big pot holes and inconveniences. So those quality of life issues that affect peoples ability to get around and the basic infrastructure issues are really important to residents of cities, it seemed obvious. But even when you list all the other important issues, economic development, education, the environment, that comes up very high in most of the survey, so it's just I am just addressing the points of this conversation.
Chris Kelly: Well done David, Orville -.
Orville Schell: One of the one of the themes that came out of the session at the end of the day yesterday about what America stands for was this this idea that we really do need to look outward, that there is a lot going on in the world that would be very instructive for us. And as many of you know China is been in an area that I have been interested in for a long, long time. Now it wasn't so long ago that we referred to places like China as the third world. Then we kind of upgraded its status a bit to the developing world and there is a kind of evolutionary chart of the nomenclature we use for these other countries. When I first went to China, in 1975, I remember very vividly worked I was working at a factory in Shanghai and toward the end of our stay there we did a little slide show for the Chinese. In those days all in Mao suits, China was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. In one of the slides I worked with the fellow; this is making huge dc generators. And I worked with the bench mate who sat beside me at this event and one of the slides was this a slide of an American freeway. And over this freeway was a huge billboard. First of all the freeway was very impressive to all of the comrades in the factory, but perhaps even more impressive was the billboard was a black velvet ad of a very décolleté, beautiful blonde, sort of splayed out across the billboard with a bottle of whisky besides her. And my bench mate looked over at me and he said "Why do you want to do that?" But he was also incredibly impressed by our highways. And this of course was the result of that great surge of infrastructural building in this country. At that time in Beijing there was one high-rise building in the whole city. Those of you who have been there, now know you couldn't count the high-rises if you wanted to, in a life time. The paradox now is that China has really leapt forward, it has not only leapt leapfrogged over many stages of sort of technological development, but it is staggering what they have done. And it's also instructive for us as Americans, because in many ways as you go on train from Washington to New York, or you go out to the airport in Kennedy, I mean you really feel like you are in a third world country. The place is falling apart. And then if you go in a train in China, may be you just want to go up to Lhasa for the weekend on that nice new train. I mean it's incredible what they have done. And I think this isn't to extol China too extravagantly because there are many, many problems. But its worth us may be spending a few minutes to look at you know, what's going on in these countries by way of infrastructure because we have fallen so far behind. Now many of the things that China has as advantages are things that I think we wouldn't particularly want to adopt. That they are not constant with the way government runs, with our political ideology, but nonetheless I think there are some examples. If you look across China I made a couple of trips in the last few months where I have driven and you know, the Expressway system, even for someone like me who goes all the time to China, has been doing this for a long, long time, it is almost unbelievable. These expressways are not only well built, they are well landscaped. You look at what's going on in Beijing now. They are cleaning it up for the Olympics. I mean you know, there are potted flowers, there is mowed grass, there are trees, there is greenery. Again it makes our cities look like some incredible retrograde you know, world of you know, Blade Runner or something. It's quite stunning. You look at the airports, the airport of Beijing when I first went there was a nice Stalinist structure about as big as this tent. Since then there have been four it could even be five other new airports that have been built and now they are building another one for the Olympics. And you see this again like one of those evolutionary charts in high school biology; you know where slowly the protoplasm get some fins and legs and walks up on the beach. And you can see right before your eyes this high speed infrastructural investment. Ports I won't go through the whole list, but you know maglev trains, railroad railway infrastructure, subways, dams, you all know about these iconic projects which this country has undertaken. Now they have been able to do this because there is no EIRs. Most interestingly there is no private property. So you want to straighten a few curves out on the on the you know, the Boston-New York run, fine, may be you will have a few demonstrations, a few protests, but never mind. The interests of the commonweal as perceived by the Chinese communist party trump the private interest. This is a big problem for us. When we are dealing with infrastructure, how do we factor in the private interest? China has also had this massive Pump Priming Program to fund public infrastructure, issue bonds, I mean they don't need to fool around with a two thirds vote. You know, they don't need to go to the people to convince them of anything; it's just something that they do. Now this can have some deleterious consequences as well. There is also another interesting aspect which I don't think we don't want to adopt here and that is a kind of a Crony Capitalism which exists between you have to remember, in the Chinese Communist Revolution all the property of the nation got confiscated and nationalized. And now they are feeding it back into the market place in long term leases. This means that the party cadres who are in charge of state assets have a huge amount of power; they also can have a huge amount of possibility for graft and corruption. But when they link up with the banks which the government also owns, I mean they can do any thing and they do. And it's sometimes not very market driven and sometimes that they have projects that don't make a lot of sense. They do make a lot of money for people who are putting them together. But it means that that society can move on infrastructure in a way that a democratic society simply can't. Now early on when I was in China, there was a slogan "Politics in Command" and you really saw it. The road in from the airport of Beijing was two lanes, nice little pathway trees on either sides. I remember coming in the first night, in early 1975, there was not a light to be seen. There were no cars, no nothing. Now of course it's a big toll road. But it's simply to say that it's worth us having a look at this this other way of doing things, because it is going to leave us behind. And as you two have so elegantly described; infrastructure or some thing you cut your maintenance budget, no body notices until the building falls down. You don't fix the highway, you don't build the new bridge, no body notices until the earthquake takes it out. And then then you do notice it. Politics in command was the slogan in China. The great paradoxes I view, our problems of infrastructure here, is we are living in a country now where curiously politics is in command. And it prevents us from doing things. Look at the Immigration Bill. You couldn't even pass something like that which has an absolutely urgent need and urgent I might add economic need to kind of fuel our economy with people who are willing to do the sorts of jobs which most Americans who have been around a while don't want to do. We can't get things done. And we have this gross and completely I think you know; on the welcome misallocation of resources, China has no wars. It's a big deal not to have a war. It means all that money goes into the country. We are exporting all of our money abroad to no good and the infrastructure here at home I think is it shows every evidence of being you know a neglected child. So I think it's interesting to look at China, it's very frightening to look at China, whatever aspect; telecommunications, air transport, airports, you name it, they are on the march. And I should conclude simply by saying that we often think of China as a country that sort of in transition and it is, but they have stumbled across I think without quite realizing it, a model of economic development. It's a sort of market Leninism to be frank. But it actually in an economic sense works. I don't particularly want to live in a Leninist society. I don't think any of you do. But we simply have to find a way it seems to me; to be able to move, to decide and to focus energy on the things that will keep this country competitive and great rather than this incredible bipartisan you know partisan bickering and this misallocation of national resources to projects which are of no have no good consequence for anybody in this room.
Chris Kelly: Well said, Orville, thanks. So I would like to just pick from that point, and when I was kind of just jotting some notes down, it struck me that where as we see these biology diagrams of people evolving, we see the US devolving. And that's a big concern you know and that really is very disturbing. And so I am struck with just a basic question. What is the call to action? And what is their proper call action? Is it one call or do you have to segment the problem? And as was suggested you know where does the call come from? Does it come from the Mayors? Does it come from the people? Does it come from the politicians? It's not clear to me, but it's certainly clear that on this issue every body is being affected, industry, you know is demanding congestion solutions at the Department of Transportation you know supply chain added costs are astronomical. So the question that I have first is you know, what's the call and where did that come from? Gary -.
Gary Schulman: Well, I guess, getting back to what Orville said, it's very difficult to in the United States to resolve a lot of these issues because there are so many players in every decision. and so many stove pipes. And you know, I can see that in my office window in New York, they dig up the street; ConEd comes in, fixes one thing, they close up the street. Then the cable company comes in, they open up the street, fixes it, close down the street. Then the next week the gas company and so a street that might have been closed for two months if everybody were working together, you know, is two-three years because each individual utility cannot coordinate to the city and yet there is no mechanism for it to do that. And I think one of the things we are really going to have to do is I am saying this, it's not a technology issue, it's a cooperation across government stove pipes in the US, Federal State and Local that you don't always have in other countries and it allows them to make the decisions a lot faster. The other thing we have to come to grips with I think is a lot of the protections that were put in you know, to protect the economy like NEPA, back in the 60's or 70's are now being used by you know, advocacy groups to kind of stymie the progress of things that would benefit the economy. You see this every time a mass transit system is proposed. Everybody who has any objection to it gets involved in the public outreach part of the environmental impact statement. And it drags on for years and years, gets caught up in court battles. That was never the original intent of NEPA. But it's been used that way cleverly to defer progress. Unless we can get past all these institutional issues in the US, its very difficult, its kind of like the information sharing, intelligence across different agencies, these agencies don't like each other, they are at war with each other. We see it, because as consultants you know, to get them all in the room for the first time and have them agree on anything is a major production. And so that's that's a political it's an institutional issue. Its not a I think we have the money the money, that means $75 billion-$100 billion, compared to the cost of defense or social security or the healthcare system, its really not that much to upgrade our infrastructure to be world-class. But it's really and it's a way of getting all the Government agencies to work together and come up with a common solution.
Chris Kelly: David that's kind of your area.
David Cicilline: Yeah. I mean, I think from my perspective, it almost always is local leadership. I mean I am just using my own example on Providence. You know, we I saw that transportation in Rhode Island was a very important issue, sort of how to move people around and how do we build on our existing system. And I didn't really have the right to do it, I was the Mayor of the Capital City but I am not the Governor. But I formed a group called Transit 2020. I had invited everyone to be a part of that the State Department of Transportation, Representatives of our Federal Delegation, Representatives of the Public Transit Authority, all of these various stakeholders business leaders and they worked on a Metropolitan Transportation Plan. Now some people thought, you know, why is the Mayor that's not really the City; but it was it came from people who lived in the City, who thought, well this as an urgent problem; we need somebody needs to sort of take it up; that then more of tend to that group when the finish their report, which is now serving as the basis for the streetcar system that we are going to build, they said, you know, we don't want to stop. We actually think as a as leaders of the State, that this system of this infrastructure and this system of public transportation is so critical that though we are done with what you asked us to do, we want to stay together as an advocacy group. And so they have stayed together to make sure what we start, it gets done. But I think, it requires leadership it doesn't have to be a Mayor. But I think its it has to be coming ultimately from the residence of a community who say, "We want to live in a City or in a Country that has safe places to for people to drive and good systems of public transportations, move around and that's respectful of our environment, that supports the growing of our economy and the creation of good jobs and all those things." Ultimately, hopefully at the elected officials hear that from their people that they work for and serve and it will take different forms; it might be a City Task or it might be a state one, but I think it you know, sort of people have demand it for the elected officials to respond to it in general.
Orville Schell: You know, I think you are you are very right in your analysis that these things have to come up from the bottom. But paradoxically they also require leadership at the top and if I compare our country to China again it's a sort of inverted pyramid in many areas that you could look at. And what I mean by that is in China, there is relatively lightened national leadership, but they have real problems down at the local levels affecting things because there is great economic autonomy. In our Country, paradoxically, the leadership at the top is well I would have to say -
David Cicilline: Not enlightened.
Orville Schell: - brain dead. and when you get down to the state level and the municipal level you find tremendous amount of energy and excitement. But it's the old Yin Yang wager, you need both. And I think that what's needed in this country is the kind of call to arms at the top which could set the terms of the game, whatever legislation is needed, whatever tax programs might allow the funds to filter down and then you need exactly what you are talking about; down at the state municipal level because that's where things actually have to happen. But we have this vacuum at the top where nobody is asking anybody to do anything. The sacrifice to rallied arms, do this, to do that, but I think there an immense willingness actually to put shoulders to the wheel, I am always surprised when I meet people like you. If there is many smart, essential beings in positions of power I mean because it's not easy to go through the process of getting your self elected. It's a very abrasive process. But I don't think we are sort of matching top and bottom in terms of leaderships.
Chris Kelly: And I think that's oh, go ahead.
David Cicilline: No, I just want to add quickly, I think what's worse actually is it's not even just a vacuum of power. I think what we see at the local level is that Federal government and national leadership that are creating obstacles and working actually against some of this some of the whether it's in the area of climate change or transportation or education, isn't just sort of neutrally run. It's actually actively working against the kind of entrepreneurial, creative, self started Mayors or local leaders around the country that are trying to do this work.
Gary Schulman: Yeah but you have to remember I mean I am not to defend the Federal government because this issue goes across Republican and Democratic administrations. The Federal government basically its role in something like transportation infrastructure is to hand out money, grants and regulate safety. But the exception that FAA that runs the air Traffic Control System, they have no operating responsibility.
Orville Schell: But that's a big exception and they can't even do that.
David Cicilline: How do you know?
Gary Schulman: But why can't they and why can't they do that, so that's the question.
Orville Schell: Well, why?
Gary Schulman: I think that you know well it's a good thing. Air traffic control system is a good one. I think it's so deeply rooted in this the linkages between federal, state and local politics that no one can act and I think every other country in the world except for France and the US has privatized the air traffic control system; that's run by private companies.
Orville Schell: I don't think China has them.
Gary Schulman: Not yet, but but the point is that it's very difficult to every time this issue comes up, it's squashed, because there are these I think the 23 TRACONs. Each one of them with very highly paid air traffic controllers in the right congressional district and as soon as you mention it, it gets shut down. I mean you really don't need 23 independent you know, control centers. You need one and a back up. And yet we can't seem to you know, it's kind of like m-track. Everybody knows it could be done better but it's just this kind of balance in Congress between those who want to support the railroad unions and those who want the stations in every little town across Nebraska and so they just can't find a solution.
Orville Schell: And yet Reagan fired a whole lot of them.
Chris Kelly: Very good and I guess you know from where I am is that there doesn't seem to be any tipping point that's really going to cause us to act yet. And so you know what I am worried about is it's going to be crisis that requires us to act. And we have seen how sometimes in crisis we can actually make the big wrong move when we have to act. So with that let me open up to the audience.
