It turns out we can, in fact, build things. Time to build sidewalks.

I-95's collapse and resurgence within two weeks should give us hope: we can build infrastructure if we gave even one single sh*t about it. Who's got a trillion dollars?

A few weeks ago, FHWA Administrator, and former Colorado DOT Executive Director, Shailen Bhatt posted this on LinkedIn:

He’s right, of course. There was a united focus. The affected portion of the highway that burned and broke was retrofitted with new support and asphalt within two weeks. Transit saw a bump and people didn’t collectively lose their minds because they had to reroute or change commute modes for a few weeks. SEPTA’s ridership bumped—very likely directly correlated or explained by the fact that people couldn’t take their “normal” commute. This is the most obvious outcome.

What wasn’t so obvious was the amount of nice each of the agencies played with each other. Historically, and the proof is in the “we don’t build stuff,” but lots of this is either because of our vertical federalism—the Feds own infrastructure and policy proce…