When concrete rains down on your car
Five years after the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, the money may be running out
At 6 a.m. on May 7, John Toledo was driving home from his job at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection when debris from the concrete roof of an overpass suddenly fell in front of his car, blowing out a tire.
Toledo posted dashcam video of the falling material on Reddit, and told Gothamist, “If I would have been one or two more seconds further forward, instead of that piece of concrete hitting the front of the car, it could have come through the windshield, and I wouldn’t be speaking to you.” (Officials said it wasn’t falling concrete, but lighter material and dust.)
Six days later, actual falling concrete injured a driver on the same road, the Trans- Manhattan Expressway, which connects the Cross Bronx Expressway to the George Washington Bridge. The driver was taken to a hospital. According to the New York Times, Port Authority officials are planning a project to “fortify the overpasses.”
The two expressways are among the most heavily trafficked roads in the country. Driving on them is scary enough even when it is not raining concrete. The expressways lack shoulders in many places. Eighteen-wheelers whiz by, as they supply the 8 million people of geographic Long Island — Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau and Suffolk Counties — with goods from the mainland of America.
After the falling debris incidents, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey sent workers to inspect the overpass and to install netting to protect drivers. The agency said the winter’s repeated freeze-thaw cycles might be to blame.
The incidents’ likely cause differed from that of the sinkhole that suddenly opened up on the Long Island Expressway on May 14. The driver of a 2019 Honda, Scott Manes, suffered minor injuries when his car partly fell into the hole, setting off the airbag, Newsday reported. Officials said nearby excavation work for a sewage project probably caused the eight-by-ten-foot sinkhole.
Even though unrelated, the incidents called attention to the state of infrastructure in the U.S.
It was nearly five years ago that President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill in front of 800 applauding guests on the White House South Lawn. “America is moving again,” Biden said, “and your life is going to change for the better.”
At the time, former president Donald Trump was urging Republicans to kill the infrastructure bill and threatening primary challenges against those who backed it. One of them was Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his Senate primary this weekend after Trump supported a primary challenger. The president couldn’t forgive Cassidy for something he considered even worse than the infrastructure bill — the Louisiana senator voted to convict Trump of inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
Cassidy had helped negotiate the infrastructure bill and attended Biden’s signing ceremony. That took a certain amount of political courage. As NPR noted, “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., opposed the bipartisan bill and tweeted out the names of the 13 House Republicans, calling them ‘traitors.’” Greene has since soured on Trump.
What does Trump call Marjorie Taylor Greene now? A “low IQ traitor.”
Infrastructure week
For years during Trump’s first presidency, the White House planned a seven-day series of events focused on the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, with the goal of hammering out a bipartisan bill to fix it. But Trump kept sabotaging the effort, making “Infrastructure Week” a running joke.
As Katie Rogers wrote in the New York Times:
During the first Infrastructure Week, in June 2017, White House aides dutifully plugged along with topical messaging, hoping to distract from more pressing controversies, until Mr. Trump closed out a Rose Garden event by accusing James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, of committing perjury in his congressional testimony about the president’s behavior during an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.
“Yesterday showed no collusion, no obstruction,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s a leaker.”
Trump’s obsession with Comey shows no signs of flagging even now. In April, the Justice Department brought its second indictment of the former FBI director, this time for supposedly threatening the life of Trump by posting a photo of seashells on Instagram spelling out “86 47.” An unrelated earlier charge against Comey had been dismissed.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is due to expire September 30, and as of April, no replacement bill had been introduced in Congress, according to an engineering firm, JPC Engineering.
Since passage of the law, nearly $600 billion has been committed to more than 72,000 projects, including roads, bridges, ports and water systems. But Trump signed an executive order upon taking office that froze some payments to states if they had a connection to investments aimed at combatting climate change.
The bipartisan coalition that enacted the 2021 infrastructure law seems like a thing of the past, as Washington politics has grown even more partisan under Trump’s second term
The fiscal picture is another key factor. With the federal deficit and debt growing, funding future infrastructure investments is bound to be harder. And that problem predates Trump’s proposal to fight higher gasoline prices by temporarily suspending the tax that funds highway construction.
Hacking through the city
There may be no better example of the challenge posed by deteriorating infrastructure than the complex engineering and construction work it took to build the Cross Bronx Expressway and its connecting highways between 1948 and 1972.
As Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker, the Cross-Bronx Expressway was “one of thirteen expressways Robert Moses rammed across New York City” in the mid-twentieth century. Building such roads through the nation’s largest city was incredibly complex — and costly.
Caro noted:
For most of these roads, Moses had to hack paths through jungles of tenements and apartment houses, to slash aqueducts in two and push sewers aside, to lift railroads into the air or shove them underground. For one expressway, the Van Wyck, he had to hold up in the air the busiest stretch of railroad in the world, the switching yard through which thirteen tracks and sidings of the Long Island Rail Road pass over Atlantic Avenue in Jamaica—hold it up and hold it steady enough so that during the seven months it took to slide the huge expressway underneath, the 1,100 train movements which took place daily in that yard could continue uninterrupted.
The seven-mile Cross-Bronx “would be a huge trench gouged across a city” and, wrote Caro, had to be built “without disturbing the city’s lifelines, the water and gas mains, electric cables and telephone wires, sewers and steam pipes, streets and subways, that supplied hundreds of thousands of residents of the Bronx with services too essential to be interrupted for the long months it would take to build each section of the expressway.”
Caro faulted Moses for destroying part of the East Tremont neighborhood when a much less intrusive route existed. To the delight of the residents, Robert F. Wagner, running for mayor of New York City, had promised to oppose Moses’s route for the Cross-Bronx. But once Wagner was elected, Moses told him, according to his memoirs:
…I said, “I am sorry, Bob, but you will have to tell them you can’t move it. The city is not going to make that decision. The city pays only half the cost of land. It is federal and state money that’s involved and I represent these officials. If you try to move this Expressway you’ll never get another nickel from us. You will have to explain that it was all a mistake.”
Wagner abandoned his promise to the residents. The road was built as Moses planned it.
Where things stand
The highways, bridges and tunnels of the post-World War II boom are now 70 or more years old. Maintaining and rebuilding them is a massive task and requires political muscle, with leaders able to think long-term rather than get consumed in the daily rush of social media posts.
The last two presidents have seen their administrations greatly weakened by raging inflation — in Biden’s case. a result of the reaction to the Covid pandemic and the injection of a gusher of federal money into the economy. In Trump’s case, the inflation demon is being reawakened by rising fuel costs resulting from his war with Iran.
Even before the war, the index of highway construction costs had nearly doubled over a five-year period. The dollars allocated for infrastructure repair won’t go nearly as far as planned, due to the rise in inflation.
In March, 2025, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a grade of “C”. Its 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure was a step up from the 2021 report, which gave the U.S. a “C-” . The engineers stressed that the nation still is $3.7 trillion short of the level of investment needed to “have the nation’s infrastructure in good working order — an increase from the $2.59 trillion gap reported four years ago.”
It’s a good bet that there’s more falling concrete in America’s future — at least until we have a president who is serious about Infrastructure Week.
Any story that files Robert Moses under “bad” is a winner with me. In case you have never read it, let me recommend “Forever Blue,” by our former Newsday colleague, Michael D’Antonio. It makes clear that Moses bears a major portion of the guilt for the departure of the Dodgers. Your column also refers to the Cross Bronx Expressway, which I traveled recently—as always, with an existential sense of dread. On this occasion, Judy was driving, because I was sick. The next day I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. From now on, when we run into traffic on that hellacious road, I’ll remember to utter a suitably vulgar imprecation about Moses.