Sustainable Infrastructure Investment: Toward a More Equitable Future

This book provides examples and suggestions for readers to understand how public investment decisions for sustainable infrastructure are made. Through detailed analysis of public investment in infrastructure over the last few decades in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Finland, the author explores how the decision-making processes for major public works spending, many of them requiring quite rigorous and detailed computational methodologies, can result in plans that underserve large portions of the population, are inequitable, and fail to efficiently preserve public property. Beginning with some of the commonly offered explanations for the slow pace of investment and repair in a supposedly prosperous society facing serious environmental challenges, the book then explores media’s role in shaping the public-at-large’s understanding of the situation and the unimaginative solutions put forward by politicians. It continues with some case studies of infrastructure investment, or lack thereof, including an exploration of competing uses for government funds. It concludes with some suggestions. It is aimed at a large readership of professionals, students, and policy makers in political science, urban planning, and civil engineering.

Eric Christian Bruun has been visiting professor at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland, and adjunct faculty at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He has taught short courses at several universities around the world. He has managed or participated in numerous national and international consulting projects. He is the author of Better Public Transit Systems: Analyzing Investments and Performance (2nd edition, 2013), and co-author of An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation: Policy, Planning and Implementation (2010), both from Routledge/Earthscan. Eric has Bachelor and Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering degrees from the University of Washington and a PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.