The Infrastructure Show - Podcasts

Salt Lake City is replacing the landside infrastructure of its airport with a 21st century facility while airline operations continue. In fact, the slowdown in air travel due to the corona virus has presented airport management with an opportunity to

Rising sea level driven by climate change is threatening some coastal settlements with more frequent flooding and potential inundation. For some, the time may come to consider relocating to higher ground. This is a controversial and costly option, a

When aging infrastructure needs repair or replacement, a primary challenge is finding the money. Bay City, Michigan, northwest of Detroit, faced this problem with two key bridges, and the community ultimately decided to sell the bridges to a private

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Spring flooding in the Mississippi Valley and elsewhere in the U.S. has been extreme in 2019, driven by the usual snow melt amplified by several months of record-breaking rainfall. This pattern seems to grow stronger, and incidents of levee failures

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

The Soo locks bridge a 21 foot elevation difference between Lake Superior and Lake Huron and the rest of the Great Lakes in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. These locks are an essential link in the U.S. steel supply chain. At the end of 2018, the U.S.