Louisiana Senator David Vitter wants to stop the Federal Emergency Management Agency from updating flood maps in areas where levees have been found deficient. The senator would like to see a phased levee certification fix that would allow repairs prior to mapping in order to avoid steep insurance hikes that would hamper redevelopment.

The sticking point seems to be the need for local dollars to fix the problems, with a federal entity that is pointing out the risks.

I recently spoke with an engineering firm that has contracts with a number of small municipalities to manage their civil and sanitary engineering projects. They manage the mapping, planning, design and analysis for smaller cities that can’t afford their own in-house expertise. The manager that I spoke with indicated that the current focus on infrastructure spending, and the downturn in construction has been very good for them and their clients. Instead of cutting back, they’ve hired eight new workers in the past year.

The increase in work is due in part to stimulus spending, but also due to the bargains that can be had with many construction firms being idle. Projects that were planned and on the books at a specific budget amount can often be had right now for 20% or more off the originally estimated cost. This cost savings has spurred a great number of projects to move forward.

The philosophy of this firm was always to focus on public sector work, as the founders saw this as much more stable than development work. The decision has been a positive one for the firm in this downturn, but there’s concern that this flurry of activity is preceding a drought as many of the budgets and projects will be tapped as a result.

While aging infrastructure still poses real problems in most municipalities and good opportunities for work, a sustainable level of projects and maintenance may be difficult to achieve unless the economy stabilizes and moves toward steady growth.

There’s a growing interest on behalf of the newspaper community to make more direct connections with their readers in order to emphasize the power of their local connections. The company SeeClickFix is helping to enable this outreach with an application that mashes up Google Maps with an interface that lets citizens comment on things that need fixing in their neighborhoods. There’s even an iPhone application and other mobile web applications that give readers a quick and easy means to post issues while they’re out and about.

The site has teamed with such large-market newspapers as the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Miami Herald and the Dallas Morning News. Governments have a number of tools at their disposal to receive alerts and to manage citizen concerns. There’s also a means to allow citizens to vote on their priorities so that repair money is spent on items of highest impact.

While many cities have set up 311 services to address such issues, the ease of use of this application along with publicity generated through newspapers, make it a helpful application to harness the crowd.

Read more about the hyperlocal benefits of SeeClickFix in this story in the New York Times.

Today’s New York Times magazine is all about infrastructure. The stories cover Internet data centers, high-speed rail, an urban plan for Paris, and prisons.

A new website MyCommuteSucks.org launched last Friday on National Bike to Work Day. The site is designed to aggregate complaints about the state of transportation infrastructure in the United States, and to help commuters redirect their rage. The aggregation of complaints about potholes, driving conditions, long waits, and lack of alternative transportation options is meant to influence the upcoming Transportation Bill that is set to be debated in Congress in the coming weeks.

You can share your story, photos or videos on the site. Twitter users can tweet their bad commute experiences with the hashtag #mycommutesucks and it automatically feeds the website. Surprisingly, there’s no map interface, but perhaps that’s a future addition.

The site is a project of Transportation for America, a coalition of housing, environmental, equity, public health, urban planning, transportation and other organizations focused on creating a 21st Century national transportation program.

Blueprint America is an ongoing effort to document America’s aging infrastructure on public radio and public television. The latest program Road to the Future is set to air on Wednesday, May 20 on PBS. This installment on growth and development looks at Denver, Portland and New York City to outline how each has charted their path to where they are now.

The program focuses on the steps the America needs to take in order to remain competitive in the global economy, taking into account climate change, population growth and diminishing natural resources. Several reports have appeared on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and a number of these reports are archived on the website for viewing in full.

I just watched a report called Slow Train Coming about rail freight in and around Chicago,  and was astounded by some of the low-tech issues that plague this freight bottleneck. Given the efficiencies of rail, it’s astounding that modernizing this infrastructure has taken a back seat for so long. There are encouraging signs that investments will be made to correct this problem.

Some of the other topics that this series is tackling are: commuting and transit; bridges and roads; water; power and energy; and shipping and cargo.

As an aside, I was really excited to discover PBS Video, a beta site for finding and viewing full-length programming online.

Perhaps you’ve seen the IBM, CISCO and General Electric ads and dialogue regarding Smart Infrastructure. These initiatives are aimed at combining infrastructure maintenance and management with communications and sensors, and the New York Times just published a piece that likens the market opportunity to all of the Internet.

“In the mid-1990s, the Internet took off because its technological time had come. Years of steady progress in developing more powerful and less expensive computers, Web software and faster communications links finally came together. A similar pattern is emerging today, experts say, for what is being called smart infrastructure.”

The beauty of this movement is the focus on environmental benefits, and innovations that breed enhanced efficiency.  The highest profile effort here is the smart grid, a plan to greatly improve electric transmission, but the opportunity also extends to include intelligent transportation, improved distribution, streamlined commuter traffic, and better water management. At present these efforts are largely within the applied research arms of these large technology integrators, but the opportunity will expand to perhaps support an entire industry unto itself.

Clearly smart infrastructure relies heavily on geographic information systems as a foundational piece, and some geospatial industry players are clearly focused on this opportunity. It will be interesting to follow the developments to see new alliances form and new solutions come to market.

This all sounds so familiar, as we’ve been focused on this potential since we started V1 Magazine. It’s nice to see the growing momentum and the umbrella term of smart infrastructure emerge.

It makes sense that cities are the places where we can best reduce our impacts on the planet, and now there’s a study that quantifies the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy use from buildings, home heating, and transportation for suburban and urban areas of metro Toronto. The study by researchers at the University of Toronto appeared in The Journal of Urban Planning and Development.

This well documented assessment takes a close look at building materials used in urban development, the energy used to heat, cool and power dwelling, and the transportation energy of both urban and suburban residents. The study concludes that low-density suburban areas are more energy intensive by a factor of 2.0 to 2.5. Transportation is by far the largest factor in the difference between GHG emissions in a suburban context, and the automobile dependence of suburban residents is the cause.

Automobile use is clearly the most significant contributing factor to transportation impacts for both high-density and low-density development. In this context, and because of the much higher car dependence and vehicle-kilometers traveled by residents of the outer suburbs relative to the city core, per capita transportation-related GHG emissions and energy use associated with low-density development are found to be 3.7 times higher than those associated with high-density development.

The study clearly shows that an increase in residential density has a powerful impact on GHGs and energy use.

Texas Watchdog, a news gathering site that scrutinizes government action and urges government transparency, has mapped the approved TxDOT spending in the state. The searchable map has county-by-county spending totals, and a searchable database.

While none of the funds are specifically slated for the proposed I-69 U.S. to Mexico highway, much of the road resurfacing in the southern half of the state may become part of that corridor.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class wrote an in-depth story for the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic regarding How the Crash will Reshape America. The piece insists that we need to adapt a more concentrated geography for the United States to recover and prepare for its next wave of growth.

“We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography. It will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities. Serendipitously, it will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure. But most of all, it will be a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage.”

This thorough exploration of the shifting economic geography of the United States looks at the need for better and more concentrated use of space, and suggests that we need to allow dying cities to die. He also maintains that we need a country of renters that are more nimble and able and willing to travel where the jobs are.

Read this feature online here.