I was reading a recent article from the McKinsey Quarterly – the business journal of management consultant McKinsey & Co. – on innovation and setting goals. In the article, there was a discussion on how to disseminate ideas to an organization that has never been introduced to a new way of thinking.

So I thought about the National Transport­ation Safety Board and the Federal Highway Administrat­ion, which are charged with overseeing how our roads, bridges and other transportation systems are designed, built and maintained, and the way these organizations have been approaching bridge inspections in order to avoid failures.

The article suggested that getting a “hard count,” meaning the metrics – e.g., knocking on doors to learn the true facts in electoral polling or by counting the number of hospital beds to determine how to go about saving 100,000 lives with new procedures – are what is needed to change behaviors. Then the discussion turned to introducing checklists as a means of changing behaviors and the fact that while hospitals are not used to checklists, the aviation industry – an industry that truly cannot afford any failures – has always used checklists.

An article by McKinsey recently stated, “We are built on a 2,000-year-old culture, where we are expected as clinicians not to make mistakes. This was true with the FAA until the 1950s, when they started asking, 'Why are we crashing so many planes?' If your safety systems are built on the expectations that your pilots and your doctors won't fail, then you are going to have no safety net when they do. The FAA figured out pretty quickly that they were better off designing a system that expects the pilots to fail and then prevents that failure from causing a disaster – the failure does not have to cause a disaster. We are just beginning that journey 50 years later in healthcare.” 

The advent of the 21st century has brought about major advances in the use of technology for the design and construction of our nation’s buildings. The latest technology looks to employ systems that adapt our commercial and residential structures to act in a manner akin to a living organism, one that addresses changes in a multitude of conditions. As building management systems (BMS) that control heat, air conditioning, lighting and other building systems continue to get more sophisticated, architects and engineers are designing controls that an owner can utilize to manage a building to meet the needs of its users. Emerging standards now enable data sharing between building systems that improve efficiency, as well as provide real-time control over building operating costs.

Only a fraction of these technology advancements have trickled down to the transportation infrastructure world. As a result, our nation has a long way to go to bring prevailing and developing technology to serve our nation’s roads, bridges and tunnels in ways that will save tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars annually.

A report prepared by the nationally regarded consulting firm HNTB cites a National Cooperative Highway Research Program claims that we will need $293 billion for our surface transportation system if our nation is to meet the future needs of our growing economy. This will leave a financial gap of $50.7 billion in funding to maintain our systems and a gap of $105.3 billion if we seek to improve them.

By 2017, it is anticipated that these gaps will widen to $66 billion and $133.9 billion, respectively. Accepting that our nation will have no choice but to finally address this growing problem, one solution is to seek to slow the growth of the costs to remediate our ailing roads, bridges and tunnels by utilizing state-of-the-art available technology to inspect and establish new methods for repair.

As Congress noted in Title 23 of the U.S. code, “research and development are critical to developing and maintaining a transportation system that meets the goals of safety, mobility, economic vitality, efficiency, equity and environmental protection.” At present, however, most federally sponsored transportation research is approved without clearly defined anticipated payoffs. Much of this research is redundant with other efforts and the research quality is often totally worthless. Too often, federal research funds are the product of the political earmarking process.

As the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently reported, “Innovation is critical to the future of U.S. competitiveness and for enhancing our quality of life. This is increasingly important as political and technological changes open access to the global economy – producing both new markets and increased competition.”

A recent report by the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission noted that “New technologies, such as electronic transponders, video recognition tolling and satellite-based payment systems, are creating new options for funding the transportation system that simply have not been available before. Although none of these options are widely used yet across the country, these technological advances offer the promise of providing policy makers with new opportunities to not only raise needed funding, but also improve energy efficiency, mitigate congestion, protect the environment and improve safety.”

The commission recognized the importance of using the latest technology “to improve the nation’s ability to measure project performance data, including research into improved traffic, safety, environmental and energy modeling.”

Available technology should be able to make our infrastructure act just as a “smart building” and report on the inception of cracks in critical structural members, identify early formation of potholes when small pinholes appear and can be fixed for minimal cost, or warn when a bridge span is being overloaded and the early threat of a collapse can be addressed.

Bringing “smart building” technology to our nation’s bridges is a long way off. Simply stated, while research has been proceeding for many years in this area, the actual implementation of new technology to advance the antiquated methods for bridge inspection has hardly begun. Even the federal government has undertaken surveys to begin to understand how state engineers perform needed inspections and has acknowledged that visual inspections are neither consistent nor reliable.

As a result, many of the ratings of our “structurally deficient” and “functionally obsolete” bridges – ratings that determine how much federal aid for remediation will flow annually to the states – are inaccurately set by inspectors who choose to take a more conservative approach rather than rate an older bridge as needing less repairs.

Almost all bridge engineers would prefer to see regular monitoring of bridges. Relying upon a network of sensors located at critical junctures along a bridge, the information adduced there can guide engineers in making recommendations for early attention to bridge problems long before they transform themselves into major structural flaws – and years before they become apparent to the average bridge inspector.

According to Mohammed Attouney, a principal at New York City-based Weidl­inger Associates, a firm with lengthy experience in the design and remediation of bridges, “No matter what we do, there are limits to the human sensing capabilities. We can’t see hidden cracks, we can’t feel the erosion after a flood.” But available technology “can make the difference in a major disaster, a costly retrofit or a minor retrofit.”

The NIST report found that “There are currently no cost-effective, field-deployable sensing systems that are capable of providing continuous data with which to prioritize repair and renovation schedules and that provide sufficient warning of impending catastrophic failure.”

The age of reliance on purely visual inspection of our nation’s infrastructure should be brought to an immediate end. Technology investment and implementation must be given the highest priority. Until then, what would be wrong with developing provable checklists for bridge design, operation and maintenance to bring potential disasters that we no longer can afford down to a minimum?