Today, the ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) announced the launch of its 2025 Infrastructure Report Card, and it has me thinking about innovation in infrastructure and what that means for the construction industry in the years to come.
For those who follow the report card, it is released every four years, and 2021 was the first time we saw the overall GPA out of the D range. Achieving a C- in 2021 was progress, and now in 2025, the overall GPA is a C. Peggy Smedley is doing a deeper dive of the report card over on The Peggy Smedley Show this week.
Still, the takeaway is the same today as it was in 2021 and even in 2017 and every four years before that. There is much work to be done—and we need to consider new innovations if we want to rebuild with great fervor.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. What exactly is innovation? To be fair, it is a bit of a buzzword that is often an all-encompassing term for new technologies, products, and materials. But innovation can go further and deeper than that. It could simply be a new idea. It could be a new method. Innovation is, simply, change.
Here in my town, we have an infrastructure hurdle, one that has existed forever, since the town was established as a village in the early 1900s and built up in the mid 1950s. There is a train line cutting through the middle of town with no overpass or underpass to easily get from the North side to the South side of town. There are three major roads that cross over the tracks in our community, but if there is a train—and there often is—then residents are left waiting for what can be anywhere from 5-20 minutes.
Just last week, I experienced this taking my daughter to gymnastics. We pulled up one of the streets and there was already a line of cars several dozen deep and then gates just started going down again for a freight train. This was during rush hour traffic no less! I decided to go around to another town that does have an underpass, although, of course, that street was clogged since other people had the same idea. We were 15 minutes late for an hour-long gymnastics class.
This is not the first time this has happened either. We have been late countless times for therapies, preschool, and other activities and events. When we are late, we simply say, “there was a train,” and everyone in town understands because they have experienced it too.
The natural solution here is an over or underpass, right? Not so fast. As many in the construction industry know an over or underpass is expensive, costing millions of dollars, and while many residents want it, others argue it is just too expensive and will never happen.
But what if there was another solution? What if, as a resident, I had access to an app that told me the train schedule for the day—both commuter and freight—and that gave realtime updates for the status of the trains. If I knew a train was coming at 5:03, and I needed to cross the track at that time, then I could plan to leave a couple minutes early. What happened to the saying there’s an app for that! Naturally, there are big hurdles here too. Building apps like this are not cheap. Getting realtime updates from all the trains is not an easy feat either. And not all residents have access to smartphones. So, I do recognize it is not an ideal solution either.
But my point here is we need to start thinking outside the box. The old way of doing things isn’t always going to cut it anymore. We need innovation more today than ever before if we want to solve the infrastructure hurdles that are still in front of us. Let’s consider what infrastructure challenges are in front of us and consider different methods and technologies that might be able to help solve them.
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