© AFPGenoa's Morandi bridge collapse, which killed at least 38, has echoes of a tragedy in Minnesota 11 years ago. The US, UK and Germany have underinvested in roads, rail and tunnels for years
Across the west, the case for more public spending on infrastructure is unanswerableAnyone who lives in Minneapolis will understand the anger and grief of people in Genoa this weekend. Eleven years ago, an eight-lane interstate highway bridge over the Mississippi river in downtown Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 people. The similarities between the tragedy in Minnesota and that in the northern Italian city on Monday are painfully striking. They underline that decaying infrastructure is not a purely Italian problem, but a scourge found in many of the world's most advanced economies.
Like Genoa's Morandi bridge, whose collapse killed at least 38 people, the bridge in Minneapolis was opened in 1967. Just as the US National Transportation Safety Board concluded that a design flaw in the bridge had contributed to the 2007 collapse, so Italian prosecutors are investigating whether the Genoa disaster had a similar cause.
In each case, the volume of traffic passing over the bridge in the years before its collapse was much greater than had been foreseen during its construction in the 1960s.
The parallels between the US and Italian experiences do not stop there.
In a nutshell, neither country spends as much public money as it should on bridges, roads, tunnels and other infrastructure. More than once, President Donald Trump has likened
the US to a "Third World country" when it comes to infrastructure. Ray LaHood, transportation secretary under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, says the US is "one big pothole". Every four years the American Society of Civil Engineers publishes a report card on the nation's infrastructure. Last year the association awarded the US a miserable D+.
The story is no different in Italy. Public investment in infrastructure slumped after the 2008 financial crisis, which plunged the nation into successive recessions. But the problem has deeper roots.
Comment:
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