The United States is in the middle of the largest single expenditure on upgrading the nation’s infrastructure in at least 50 years — with $1.6 trillion allocated for everything from removing lead water pipes and replacing crumbling bridges to filling gaps in broadband internet access and rolling out a continent-wide electric vehicle charging network.
For comparison, even in inflation-adjusted dollars, that’s more than twice what the U.S. spent mid-20th century to establish the entire 47,000-mile interstate system.
To spend that $1.2 trillion wisely, we need to map where the problems are most acute. And we need a whole new way of managing projects. We need the choice of projects to be smart, equitable, impactful, and we also need the solutions themselves to be smart.
If we do it right, we’ll end up with infrastructure that is future-proof — effective for us now, and adaptable to the future we can see coming.
Similar dramatic infrastructure spending is going on across Europe and Asia, in part driven by the need to shift to clean energy, and the need to build resilience in the face of climate change. It’s a once-in-a-generation effort.
And that’s why how we spend this wave of infrastructure funding really matters; it can’t follow the patterns of the last century.
The infrastructure has to be location-smart. It has to be climate-smart. It has to be environmentally smart, it has to be socially smart, it has to be money smart. To achieve that, we need to pick the places with maximum impact — for new broadband access, for EV charging stations, for new power lines. We don’t just need more miles of power lines. We need all our power lines, existing and new, to be intelligent: to report their condition and their capacity through the use of sensors and location analytics.
We have to build new bridges, new buildings, new stormwater systems that are all designed to withstand the impact of climate change — today, and 25 years from now. We have to build to reduce the impacts of climate change, in part by modeling infrastructure after natural systems and by being strategic about where it is constructed. We need the infrastructure to be socially smart — using mapping and demographic data so this wave of infrastructure spending reduces social and economic inequities, instead of magnifying them, as prior infrastructure investments often have.
Some techniques are strikingly simple. To help battle heat-island effects in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, officials have planted grass alongside and between the trolley tracks that course through the old city. Prague’s new network of real-time temperature sensors, along with fine-grain demographic maps, helps track the impact of heat mitigation efforts at the street level and identify which neighborhoods with older adults or young children might be most affected.
Some techniques rely on mapping, geographic information systems (GIS) technology, and data analytics capabilities that have become more powerful in the last five years. Los Angeles is the second-largest school district in the US, but during the pandemic school officials discovered huge gaps in broadband internet access for their students. Even though Los Angeles is completely urbanized, one in five LA students didn’t have reliable broadband. In some neighborhoods, as many as one-third of families didn’t have access.
The sweep of the problem was arresting. Solving it required block-by-block specifics. The city used layered mapping techniques to discover where broadband wasn’t in place or was too expensive, and how those broadband deserts matched with neighborhoods with large numbers of school-age children. The city then matched those areas with possible broadband corridors and with city buildings and infrastructure. To speed the roll-out of new internet, Los Angeles has offered to let providers use city buildings and facilities to install antennas and routers. The result: smart infrastructure that closes equity gaps, using money and time resourcefully — built on a foundation of the simplest of tools, maps. Detailed, data-rich maps.
This kind of thinking isn’t ancillary to today’s infrastructure planning, nor is it ornamental. In the state of Virginia, it’s been systematized and incorporated into a planning process called SMART SCALE. Proposed transportation projects are scored on their ability to reduce congestion, improve safety, increase accessibility to underserved groups, drive economic development, and have a beneficial impact on the environment. The planning system centers around the idea that it’s more than a bridge or a highway widening. It’s a project that can shape jobs and opportunity, real estate values and street flooding, and the quality of life for decades to come. It needs to be smart by design.
One nonprofit that works with transportation agencies transforms rights of way (ROW) on the sides of highways into renewable energy resources. By using GIS, the organization analyzes and identifies which precise ROW locations are most suitable for planning smarter infrastructure like solar power, EV charging stations, and expanded broadband.
Brisbane, Australia, is putting all these techniques to use on the biggest infrastructure project in the history of the city, and its state, Queensland. Cross River Rail involves upgrading eight existing transit stations and building four new ones. The 6-mile extension of a subway line is passing underneath the heart of the city’s downtown and also underneath the Brisbane River.
Already a metropolis of 2.6 million people, Brisbane is expected to grow by 40 percent in the next decade. The Cross River Rail project, costing $6.7 billion (US), will bring transit access to thousands of new jobs in downtown — and, it’s hoped, encourage the creation of those jobs.
The entire project is being modeled using digital techniques, down to the millimeter. Every supplier and contractor uses the same data and rendering software; every escalator and beam and tunnel, every railroad tie and electrical conduit and light fixture is rendered in the 3D model with blue-print precision. And it is all placed in the actual geography of Brisbane using GIS, again with absolute precision.
The result is that the model itself becomes the virtual copy of the physical infrastructure. It’s the common way of talking about everything from the placement of sewers and staircases to trees and bike paths.
Planners, architects, engineers, and contractors are all looking at exactly the same images and schematics in real time. The Cross River Rail project even set up a movie theater so staff and non-technical stakeholders can look at how the project sits in the world of Brisbane in full scale. It was used, for instance, to show what commissioned public art projects would look like inside stations and to test different ways of getting that art installed 150 feet below ground.
The effort was so successful that Cross River Rail has taken on the additional responsibility of anticipating and helping shape the economic impact of the new subway line. Now, the entire central business district of Brisbane above ground has now been rendered and added to the digital model.
The 3D model is so reliable and finely developed, it will remain in place once the subway trains start running — as a real-time digital twin, guiding the moment-to-moment operation of the rail system.
Cross River Rail is a subway line, but it’s also a huge public project that has become part of the fabric of the future of Brisbane, above ground as well as below.
Says Russell Vine, Cross River’s chief innovation officer, “We went from, ‘It’s all about building a railway’ to, ‘Ah! It’s also about rebuilding the city.’”
Too often, big infrastructure projects have muscled themselves into existence by their sheer scale, often stealing from nature, or from the vitality of the communities they rolled through.
Now we have the tools, and the understanding, to make our infrastructure much more dynamic, even when it’s made of concrete — to make sure it feeds a community’s long-term resilience, as well as its rush-hour mobility flows. With the mapping and analysis that GIS provides, we can use the unprecedented funding for infrastructure now available in the smartest ways possible. And if we can see precisely where and how to locate these new projects, they will have the best and most long-lasting impact for communities across the U.S., and the world.
To learn more about how GIS is a crucial tool for building smart infrastructure, visit esri.com/en-us/industries/infrastructure-management.
