Why ‘shovel-worthy’ beats ‘shovel-ready’ for infrastructure projects
Introduction
‘Shovel-ready’ is lingo to describe a project that’s ready to start building straight away. As the value of investing in infrastructure has risen in both political and public consciousness, it’s become a short-hand description for any project that just needs the bureaucrats and politicians to sign off on it so construction can start.
However, a shovel-ready project doesn’t mean it’s ‘shovel-worthy’. An infrastructure project has to stack up economically, true, but these days it also has to have benefits beyond the purely financial.
Why so?
It’s the politics, stupid
Politics is who gets what, when, how. Howard Lasswell
Infrastructure is life, life is politics and politics is people.
For any professional making their living building or maintaining infrastructure, politics affects our livelihoods. The politicians themselves can’t be experts in everything infrastructure, and so look to experts to advise them on what projects to support. These hard nosed experts often focused too much on the numbers — the technical aspects of the problem or the economics. In some cases, the experts were more powerful than the politicians. And there’s a real danger when you have a heavyweight expert with a vision and the will to execute that vision.
New York’s master builder
Robert Moses was an expert with vision and will. A mid-20th century official in New York, he was also a canny political operator whose singular vision transformed the city. In his 44 year career, his massive building programme meant ‘Around 500,000 people, who happened to find themselves in the way of Moses’s vision, were evicted from their homes’. Moses’ vision may have stacked up economically or technically, but was his bulldozing of new infrastructure through so many lives ‘shovel-worthy’?
A polarizing figure, the jury is still out on the ‘master builder’ of New York.
We can’t allow modern day infrastructure projects to start without a more balanced consideration of their positive benefits and, to use a technical term, their negative ‘dis-benefits’. This is why they have to have shovel-worthiness.
The balancing act
Infrastructure costs more than money.
Building infrastructure costs in disrupting people’s lives during construction and operation, environmental impacts and potential creation of toxic future legacies. In the past, the financial benefits were to the fore and the dis-benefits to people and nature labelled ‘the price of progress’. We can see how that approach is playing out as we face a century of crisis from human-induced climate change or watch cities crumble under unequal infrastructure distribution.
An example of damaging infrastructure can be seen with London’s Westway motorway of the 1960’s. As well as destroying a tightly knit community, the project failed to solve the traffic problem and has left sterilised dereliction beneath it’s elevated sections. It was such a failure at all levels, the rest of a more ambitious programme — the ‘Ringways’ had to be abandoned. This saved London from a fate ‘much worse than traffic jams’ as Jay Foreman explains below.
These days, if infrastructure ain’t woke, it’s gonna go broke
Shovel-worthy projects are those that try to take a more balanced view of the infrastructure’s benefits or dis-benefits. This leads to a better overall outcome; creating a more balanced project that is capable of creating value beyond the purely economic or technical — a socially valuable project that keeps infrastructure professionals in work while improving the lives of everyone else.
Realising a successful infrastructure project in the modern world means infrastructure professionals need to think beyond the design and construction project management tools of the ‘iron triangle’ of cost, scope and schedule. We can see how the US President is planning to turn ‘shovel-worthy’ projects into ‘shovel-ready’ projects to help sell his $2tn ‘American Jobs Plan’ to ensure it delivers more than a purely economic benefit.
Globally, as politics wakes up to the problems of carbon, community and connection in our built environment, the importance of suitable and sustainable infrastructure will continue to grow. We will start to demand our infrastructure has a value purely beyond the technical need it satisfies and being to apply a ‘shovel-worthiness’ test as part of the business case for investment.
Final thoughts
As an infrastructure professional, I welcome the increasing focus on ‘shovel-worthy’ projects. Infrastructure impacts people’s lives in a very fundamental and important way. Therefore, why wouldn’t I want to make my work as positively impactful as possible?
Enda Casey is a civil engineer who works on large infrastructure projects. He likes writing about the philosophical principles behind infrastructure in his spare time.
