Abundance

by Ezra Klein

On June 11, 2023, a tanker truck carrying 8,500 gallons of gasoline flipped over. The truck ignited underneath the I-95 bridge in Philadelphia, killing the driver and melting the steel beams undergirding it. The I-95 bridge, which carries 160,000 cars daily, collapsed. This wasn’t just a crisis for a roadway. It was a crisis for a region. I-95 is one of the main transportation arteries on the East Coast. It’s a crucial connector between New York and Washington. Officials, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, warned that rebuilding it would take months. And it would have taken months, or longer, under Pennsylvania’s normal rules. “We would hire a consultant to design it,” Mike Carroll, the Pennsylvania secretary of transportation, says. “We’d need final design approved by the Federal Highway Administration. Then there’d be bidding from interested contractors. Then we’d process the bids. Then we’d issue a contract. That’d take about twelve to twenty-four months.”52 But Shapiro signed a declaration of emergency that exempted the rebuilding process from the rules and requirements that slow so many public projects down.