Infrastructure

Summer 2024’s record heat is creating problems for transportation infrastructure, from roads to rails. New York’s Third Avenue Bridge, which swings open for ship traffic on the Harlem River, was stuck for hours after its metal expanded in the heat and it couldn’t close. Roads have buckled on hot days in several states, including Washington and Wisconsin. Amtrak warned passengers to prepare for heat-related problems hours before a daylong outage between New York and New Jersey; the risks to power lines and rails during high temperatures are a growing source of delays for the train system. It doesn’t help that the worsening heat is hitting a U.S. infrastructure system that’s already in trouble. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure an overall grade of C- in its latest national Infrastructure Report Card, released in 2021. While there has been some improvement – about 7.5% of U.S. bridges were in poor condition, compar...

With the Olympic torch extinguished in Paris, all eyes are turning to Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics. The host city has promised that the next Summer Games will be “car-free.” For people who know Los Angeles, this seems overly optimistic. The car remains king in LA, despite growing public transit options. When LA hosted the Games in 1932, it had an extensive public transportation system, with buses and an extensive network of electric streetcars. Today, the trolleys are long gone; riders say city buses don’t come on schedule, and bus stops are dirty. What happened? This question fascinates me because I am a business professor who studies why society abandons and then sometimes returns to certain technologies, such as vinyl records, landline phones and metal coins. The demise of electric streetcars in Los Angeles and attempts to bring them back today vividly demonstrate the costs and challenges of such revivals. The 2028 Olympi...

Preparing for Atlantic hurricane season is always a priority in the Caribbean, especially when forecasts project high numbers of storms, as they do for 2024. The region’s most devastating storm in recent years, Hurricane Maria, struck in September 2017 and inflicted unprecedented destruction on Puerto Rico, Dominica, St. Croix and other islands. Maria killed more than 3,000 people and caused about US$96 billion in damage. It devastated Puerto Rico’s electric power system, leaving 1.5 million customers in the dark for up to 328 days – the longest blackout in U.S. history. These outages had cascading impacts on other infrastructure, such as water and communications systems. Today, the Caribbean region is experiencing new climate-related challenges. Prolonged extreme heat and humid days are increasing because of the accelerated warming of ocean waters. In response to these increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, I teamed up with a dozen other resea...

“When it rains, it pours” once was a metaphor for bad things happening in clusters. Now it’s becoming a statement of fact about rainfall in a changing climate. Across the continental U.S., intense single-day precipitation events are growing more frequent, fueled by warming air that can hold increasing levels of moisture. Most recently, areas north of Houston received 12 to 20 inches (30 to 50 centimeters) of rain in several days in early May 2024, leading to swamped roads and evacuations. Earlier in the year, San Diego received 2.72 inches (7 centimeters) of rain on Jan. 22 that damaged nearly 600 homes and displaced about 1,200 people. Two weeks later, an atmospheric river dumped 5 to 10 inches (12 to 25 centimeters) of rain on Los Angeles, causing widespread mudslides and leaving more than a million people without power. Events like these have sparked interest in so-called sponge cities – a comprehensive approach to urban flood mitigation that uses i...

Scenes from the Houston area looked like the aftermath of a hurricane in early May 2024 after a series of powerful storms flooded highways and neighborhoods and sent rivers over their banks north of the city. Hundreds of people had to be rescued from homes, rooftops and cars during storms, according to The Associated Press. Huntsville registered nearly 20 inches of rain from April 29 to May 4. More storm systems over the following weeks blew out windows in Houston high rises and caused more flash flooding on urban streets and already saturated ground in the region. Floods are complex events, and they are about more than just heavy rain. Each community has its own unique geography and climate that can exacerbate flooding. On top of those risks, extreme downpours are becoming more common as global temperatures rise. I work with a center at the University of Michigan that helps communities turn climate knowledge into projects that can reduce the harm of future climate disasters. F...