Philly fixed a melted interstate in 12 days. Why does everything else take so long?
If Philadelphia could reconstruct a melted highway in a matter of days, then why, three years later, does it still often take months, years, or even decades to complete projects that seem far simpler?
Key points
- And there is no silver bullet for building everything as fast as I-95 was rebuilt, which after all, required a disaster declaration, a blank check of a budget, and crew working night and day.
- “We knew we didn’t have the ability to take our time in terms of thinking about next steps,” said Carroll, who grew up in a small town outside Scranton, where he still lives today.
- Remarkably, officials there had managed to get things back up and running in just 44 days, a month ahead of their initial schedule.
Publicly, Shapiro and many experts posited that rebuilding would likely take much longer, turning a Philadelphia corridor traversed by 160,000 cars each day into a sluggish limbo, as they found other paths to and from work.
Additional details
- By day six, demolition was completed and sports bars around Philly had begun showing a 24/7 livestream of the construction site.
- The rapid reopening of I-95 has been held up as a paragon of efficiency, blistering proof of what’s possible when policymakers choose to move fast and unbreak things, or at the very least, get out of their own way.
- “You can’t ask people to do that on every single project.” In fact, the real reason I-95 was rebuilt so quickly was largely because it was allowed to break all the rules, the very rules that keep so many other projects like it mired in a morass of red tape.
- If the US wants to fix more highways, build more train lines, or paint more bike lanes more quickly, it will need to get better at knowing when to break these rules more often, and not only when there’s an emergency.
- For every day it remained shuttered, thousands of 18-wheeler trucks were forced to divert through quiet neighborhoods, disrupting billion-dollar supply chains, while hundreds of thousands of area drivers faced a commute from hell.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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