After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill (opens in new tab)

The headline price is an artifact of congressional accounting. It is an estimate of the 10-year cost.

The MSM uses that number when their corporate masters want you to be against the spending. They actually explain why it is a fairly meaningless number when they want the spending.

It gives the DOE secretary a mandate and budget to commission projects for new, smaller nuclear plants (300MW). Unless that got removed…

California high speed rail will run $100bn. If we're lucky. Is that sexy enough?

> The $1trn headline makes me expect something to excite the imagination

A country running out of money and going into hyperinflation via money printing ?

Exciting enough for you ?

Apparently this is real — fascinating! ( The relevant text of the bill is here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684... )

This builds on an NHTSA-funded pilot program called Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADDS; https://www.dadss.org/).

DADDS advanced two technologies for passive impaired driving detection: non-contact breath sensors (exhaled EtOH near the driver), and touch sensors (embedded into the steering wheel).

The bill adds this as a requirement on top of existing distracted driving prevention systems, which have been expanding but don't always get much press (e.g. Subaru's driver-facing cameras).

The wording in the actual bill looks vague enough that I hope this is more for show than for actual implementation.

It specifically requires non-contact sensors that can “accurately” detect blood alcohol level of the driver. It may be possible to detect trace exhaled alcohol in the air, but you’re never going to get accurate blood alcohol measurements from proximity alone.

In the unlikely event that such a system made it to market, it would quickly become common knowledge among alcoholics that it could be defeated by rolling down your window to get more airflow through the cabin. More airflow means trace alcohol in the air is diluted and blown away. Reading goes to zero.

The bill also requires that the technology limit the operation of a vehicle after impairment is detected. There’s no way a system that suddenly causes a vehicle to slow down to pedestrian speeds could be considered safe for use on freeways. Can you imagine someone’s car slowing to a crawl on the freeway and forcing them to move at low speeds on the shoulder because their distraction detection system had a false positive? Even a false positive rate of 0.001% would mean a lot of us would pass a car experiencing a false positive on our commute every week. Awful.

>They're really working on making automobiles a lot safer by installing breathalyzers in every car. Exciting times!

Can't tell if sarcasm.

That’s probably a reductive take. This bill is massive, over 2000 pages. It has funding for all kinds of transportation, green, energy and digital infrastructure. Roads are a part of that because once they are built, they need to be maintained or else people will die. There are several examples of bridges and overpasses collapsing and leading to deaths and badly maintained road surface leads to fatal accidents as well. Also, talking about this bill in terms of what it does for roads and bridges is going to be the best way to talk to the public as that is the thing they experience every day. Talking about the esoterics of the energy grid isn’t going to land for most people.

> Should we not trying to decommission roads and encourage people to move to denser, walkable and cyclable city centers?

Roads are still needed inside cities and between them. The Ancient Romans (famously) had roads.

Roads used to be for people:

> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers."

> In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic

It's their current focus—basically only personal automobiles—that is the problem, and not the technology itself.

Roads act more like veins transporting resources to parts of civilization. Decrease efficiency, increase emissions. But the critical thing is infrastructure being in disrepair can and has killed people.

I can't find a source, but I have read that it is trucks which do the bulk of the wear and tear of roads.

Making these trucks electric won't help.

The US is huge, and people are already migrating to the cities (a bad move in the light of COVID). The remaining cities still need to be connected by roads, even if you’re closing down small communities.

You can also improve public transport, build bikelanes and sidewalk, while updating roads to help the parts of the community that will inevitable live outside the inner city limits.

> This whole time I've been confused how investing more money in roads is compatible with our climate goals.

It is compatible with our goal of getting from point A to point B safely. Climate goals are not the only goals, and if you look at this bill carefully, you'll see that they are quite secondary to other goals, which reflects the underlying political reality.

You'd still need most of the roads for logistical reasons. Cities need food, a whole lot of food, and it has to come from somewhere it can actually be grown.

Only about 10% of the money is for actual infrastructure like roads.

It’s not really about infrastructure like roads and stuff. It’s about “infrastructure.”

good catch; it's $550B in new spending and $450B of renewing infrastructure programs that were going to expire (or have expired since the bill has dragged on)

I don't know what the $450B is though, all the media focus and interest is on the new shiny stuff.

You have to be more specific and explain why the middle class slaves don’t benefit from power lines, airports, fixed water pipes, flood protections etc.

I’d be interested to know the implications if you have time to share.

Good

Why? Would it not be worse if the bill had not passed?