Infrastructure Week Facilitates Cross-Sector Collaboration, Innovation

Zach Schafer is CEO of Infrastructure Week, a Washington, DC, USA-based nonprofit organization focused on addressing America’s infrastructure challenges and bringing together business, labor, and government to build solutions. Led by a steering committee and more than 500 affiliate organizations, the seventh annual Infrastructure Week takes place May 13–20, 2019. This year’s theme is “Let’s #BuildForTomorrow. Starting Now.” ITE Journal spoke to Schafer about the priorities of Infrastructure Week and the various issues that affect transportation professionals, as well as the various sectors that intersect with the industry. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

ITE JOURNAL: ITE’s priorities include making transportation infrastructure safer and more efficient for the public. How has Infrastructure Week as an organization specifically focused on transportation issues when it comes to infrastructure (highways, roads, bridges, parking structures, etc.)?

ZACH SCHAFER: Infrastructure Week looks at all sectors—transportation, water, energy, communications—and looks at a lot of the crosscutting issues that tie them all together. And because Infrastructure Week is that big tent, we end up talking frequently about how the silos between those verticals are breaking down in many ways.

That’s one of the things that is interesting and exciting about Infrastructure Week. Because we have all those stakeholders together, they’re all talking about how to optimize infrastructure as a complex system of infrastructure, including transportation. And included in transportation is transit, highways, and autonomous vehicles, everything from bike lanes and scooters and new mobility options to traditional rail or bus rapid transit. So how do all of these systems blend together, and how can they all both complement each other and share the same space in the future? And also, how do they interact with water and energy and with communications systems?

So specifically to your question, when it comes to making infrastructure safer or more efficient, partially that has to do with keeping it in a state of good repair, and we will talk a lot about that during Infrastructure Week: we have to maintain the infrastructure we have. And In many cases we need to expand it, upgrade it, and so on.

But beyond that, when we think about how it makes the road safer, or transportation and infrastructure systems more efficient, many times that happens by blending that physical infrastructure with new technologies, such as sensors that collect data on traffic patterns to figure out how do people actually use the system, so planners and engineers can make it more efficient.

So breaking down those silos is a key piece of Infrastructure Week. We want to understand what the forces and trends and new demands are that we need to think about over the next 50 years, and how transportation engineers, electrical engineers, and urban planners all need to be working together to build those solutions.

ITEJ: Funding is a major hurdle for many transportation departments who are looking to both build new infrastructure and make improvements to existing infrastructure. What are some of the innovative ways local, state, and federal officials have been funding their projects?

SCHAFER: It’s literally the $2 trillion question right now. It’s complex. Funding is not the only question—but it is a central question. It’s also worth making the distinction between funding and finance. Funding normally comes from a public source; finance is private money, with an expected return on that investment, so it can come at a higher cost but may be more available in the time horizon needed to deliver the project. So there definitely has to be a balance between and role for the two.

There are a lot of states and local communities that are doing innovative things with funding and finance, but I would also say just as if not more important is they are doing courageous things. At this moment in American politics, I think the key thing here is it’s just as much about political courage and will as it is about innovation—the courage and the will to increase funding, and that does mean going to your constituents and asking for it. But that’s what we put our elected leaders in place to do, and many of them are making that choice and their constituents are literally voting for it. And in the last elections, voters in 31 states showed their support for increasing transportation infrastructure investments, approving nearly 80 percent of the ballot measures before them.

We’re seeing funds being raised at the local level to pay for improvements and people are willing to take that on, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tampa Bay-Hillsborough County, in Maine, upcoming in Arkansas. And states have raised fuel taxes, and fees to compensate for hybrid or electric vehicles. They’re raising revenue, not just in blue states but in red states too—Georgia, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, as well as New Jersey, California, Oregon…all successfully raised revenues. I think that is a lesson for federal policy makers, and a lesson for both sides of the aisle–that they can do this, whether it’s an increase to the fuel tax (the existing primary system), which hasn’t been raised or indexed to inflation since 1993, or coming up with a new or blended system. This is an issue that the American electorate wants Congress and the administration to work together on.

ITEJ: Coming up from May 13–20, several events are planned to highlight and celebrate Infrastructure Week. How have you been engaging leaders on these topics, who can—in turn—empower their communities to shed light on Infrastructure Week priorities?

SCHAFER: One of the reasons Infrastructure Week exists is to provide a platform where stakeholders from across the political spectrum and across sectors—and also inside the infrastructure sector and outside the infrastructure sector—come together.

One of the core points that we convey through Infrastructure Week is this isn’t just about the people who build and maintain and operate infrastructure. This is about every person in this country who uses it. That’s manufacturers, retailers, the travel and tourism sector, families commuting to work, teachers, students—everyone. So next week you’ll see Randy Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, participating in our kickoff event. Now, the American Federation of Teachers doesn’t work on infrastructure 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, they’re not the road and transportation builders or ITE, but they understand that this impacts their constituents and their members. And the same thing goes for the CEOs of Siemens and Vermeer and leaders in the private sector. Many manufacturers obviously have business interest in the infrastructure space, but they also make healthcare equipment, or they make agricultural equipment—and those sectors are so dependent on infrastructure, whether it’s the electric grid or supply chains or the internet.

So the way we try to break through all the noise is by having trusted validators from all different corners of the American economy and society, and business executives, labor presidents, mayors, governors, and trusted leaders who can speak to this topic. Sometimes they’re someone who has been talking about infrastructure a lot, and sometimes they’re relatively new to it, and that alone says something. Why is this person out there talking about infrastructure? Because this does matter to education, this does matter to healthcare, this does matter to retail. This matters to everyone. And that’s why we’re looking so much to next week’s events and programming, and really encourage all of your readers to share their stories as experts in this field. How do they want to #BuildForTomorrow?