In his magisterial, improbably thrilling 1989 book The Pencil, Henry Petroski, a longtime professor of engineering and historian at Duke University, recounted that Henry David Thoreau, upon making a list of essential items to bring on an expedition into the woods, neglected to mention a crucial item, something that he was actually never without: a pencil. “Perhaps the very object with which he may have been drafting his list was too close to him,” Petroski suggests, “too familiar a part of his own everyday outfit, too integral a part of his livelihood, too common a thing for him to think to mention.”



We overlook the things that are within reach, until they are not. That this would happen with small, common, or easily replaced objects is understandable, even rational. And yet we also tend to overlook those things that are large, expensive, and central to our everyday lives. I am talking here about infrastructure. Our awareness of road networks flickers to life only when a typical commute is congested with other drivers or closed for construction—indeed, this sort of “glitch in the matrix” stirred me to write my own book on the ubiquitous, yet neglected topic of traffic—in the same way our consciousness of the complexity and expanse of the modern commercial aviation system is awoken by extensive flight delays.

If Petroski, in The Pencil, wanted to elevate the humble writing instrument as a pocket marvel of engineering, the seeming goal of his new book, The Road Taken, is less to extol the infrastructure around us as a pantheon of mechanical achievement—a subject covered in his 1995 book, Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America—as it is to remind us, with a certain urgency, that it is there. The word “infrastructure” itself, he notes, is an early twentieth-century invention; it only began to appear in language in earnest in the 1980s. As a concept, infrastructure is a bit muzzy—it can encompass almost everything from the moment you leave your front door, sidewalk to cell tower. It is the atmosphere of the built world.

“We tend to be oblivious to much of our infrastructure, even when it is in plain sight, until something goes wrong with it,” Petroski writes in The Road Taken. The engineering profession itself, he notes, has not been immune from this tendency. The American Society of Civil Engineers, the group that issues a report card for America’s infrastructure every four years, did not include “levees” as a category until 2009, four years after Hurricane Katrina, when they received an aggregate D-minus. (The United States, Petroski writes, is like a “poor student” who never learns his lessons.) Infrastructure in America seems to be the perennial barn door that’s closed after the horses have gone. We are hardly alone; substantive flood-control projects in the Netherlands and England only got going after disastrous floods in the middle part of the twentieth century. But there may be, Petroski hints, something in the American character, the impromptu pragmatism of a settler nation, that emphasizes the quick fix, what one historian called “the self-fulfilling perception that rapid innovation would quickly render current designs obsolete.” And given the wider societal lack of interest in infrastructure, small wonder there should be little political capital to be had in pushing for costly repairs or expanded maintenance. Today, politicians might be glad to show up and grab golden shovels for a bright new project, but pushing through tax increases for bridge inspections—or to guard against some vaguely predicted future event—does not make for good optics.

THE ROAD TAKEN: THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE by Henry Petroski Bloomsbury USA, 336 pp., $28

As an interest group, we might expect a certain amount of grade inflation—or, in this case, deflation—from the ASCE; proclaiming the country’s infrastructure to be in decent working order is not likely, after all, to generate much work for engineers. But it does not take a vested interest to sense that America, whose roads and rails were once the envy of the developed world, has somehow gone astray.