Podcast: The Infrastructure Show

Sometimes obsolete infrastructure can become a new asset. That’s Washington, D.C.’s plan for an unneeded highway bridge over the Anacostia River. The 11th Street Bridge Park, set for construction starting in 2021, will bring green and hard-surface open space, event venues, and new access to the river itself to the southeast sector of the District of Columbia.In this podcast, Scott Kratz, Director of the project, gives us the details of this new urban feature

Hampton Roads isn’t a road, but a body of water that links the James, Elizabeth and other rivers to the Atlantic Ocean. It is surrounded by Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and several other cities, and it’s the home of U.S. Naval sea and air operations and the Newport News shipyard. Several busy bridge-tunnel combinations span the 4-mile channel, and growing highway congestion has motivated the construction of another bay crossing.To learn the why and how of this latest mega-crossing we talk with project director James Utterback of the Virginia Department of Transportation

Persistent flooding in the upper Midwest poses risks to navigation on the Upper Mississippi River. Erosion and sedimentation are reducing channel depths and creating sandbars that block or reduce the capacity of barge tows carrying agricultural and other bulk products. This puts extra demand on channel dredging, which is the responsibility of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.To understand both the problems and responses, we talk with Steve Tapp, Operations Manager in charge of dredging and channel maintenance for the St. Paul District of the Army Corps

Colorado gets plenty of snow in the winter – some mountain areas dig out of as much as 40 feet in a season. Keeping the state roads open and safe for trucks and cars is both important and demanding.To find out more about how it’s done, the role technology is playing, we are speaking with Kyle Lester, who is Director of Maintenance and Operations for the Colorado Dept. of Transportation

Managing stormwater in cities is important to reduce flooding and secure people and property. Stormwater needs some kind of treatment before it flows to surface waters, and that treatment can be essential in older areas where stormwater and sanitary waste are collected in combined sewers. The Chicago area has built a network of underground tunnels to store that stormwater for later treatment before it goes to the river.To understand this extraordinary project we’re talking with Kevin Fitzpatrick, Managing Civil Engineer for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, who works on what is called the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan

The US freight railroad system is moving to a different operating strategy, called Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), intended to speed up service, get better utilization from infrastructure, and reduce operating costs. What is it and why does it matter?In this interview, we learn about PSR from John Friedmann, who is Vice President-Network Planning and Optimization for the Norfolk Southern railroad

People have been building dams for centuries to impound water for drinking and recreation, to support navigation, to manage floods, and as a source of hydroelectric power. But dams can also present dangers. Low-head dams, in particular, can pose invisible and deadly hazards to swimmers and boaters.To learn more about these dams, the risks they present, and what we can do about them we talk with Roger Adams, President of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, and Paul Schweiger, a member of the Association and Vice President and Dams and Hydraulics Section Manager with Gannett Fleming

Geothermal energy brings steam created with the heat of magma deep in the earth to generate electric power. California is endowed with numerous sites where magma is close enough to the surface to make geothermal energy practical. The Geysers, a geothermal field in northern California, is the world’s largest source of geothermal electric energy, where six different companies use steam from 350 wells to provide enough electric power to support nearly half-a-million homes. To learn more about the Geysers, and to explore the functionality and sustainability of geothermal power, we talk with California Energy Commissioner Karen Douglas, an attorney and one of five members of the commission

Positive Train Control, or PTC, is a set of technologies designed to assure that our railroad system is protected from collisions and error-driven accidents. The system tracks the location of trains, compares their immediate operations to infrastructure limits, the presence of other trains, and other sources of risks, and guides operators, or the trains themselves, to avoid accidents.PTC is a complicated and varied system being deployed across the nation. Two distinct systems are in use – Interoperable Electronic Train Management System (I-ETMS) and ACSES – Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System. To help us understand these systems and to learn more about PTC, we talk with Paul Victor, an experienced railroader and former President of the New York and Atlantic Railroad, a short line railroad serving customers in the New York City Metropolitan area

In 2008, Los Angeles County voters approved a half-cent sales tax increase to support specific improvements to both highways and transit facilities; in 2016, voters extended and increased that tax to support continued transportation investments.In this podcast we get a progress report on the investment program and learn about transit projects that will support the 2028 Olympic Games from Phillip Washington, CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.