ENGINEERING MARVEL: What Does It Take To Keep the Lights On and the Traffic Flowing Through the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels? “Fifty-one years after the first bore opened, the tunnels are undergoing the largest overhaul in their history. The upgrades will be significant—but will they be enough to keep the critical east-west passage open for decades to come?”

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The inability to green-light ambitious infrastructure projects is happening all over the country. Most of President Joe Biden’s lauded $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, for example, will go toward repairing or upgrading existing infrastructure instead of funding new projects on the scale of the EJMT. Even that $1.2 trillion is half of what the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the United States would need to invest over the next decade to simply maintain its ports, electrical grids, bridges, and transportation networks in a “state of good repair.” “There is something kind of nostalgic [about the EJMT]—that they could gather the will and the funding and the common commitment to build these kinds of incredible engineering marvels,” says Steven Jackson, a Cornell University professor whose areas of study include the maintenance of infrastructure systems. “There’s some question if we even remember how to do that or know how to do it together anymore.”

Sad.