We’re releasing our high-speed rail report later this week. It’s a technical report rather than a historical or institutional one, so I’d like to talk about a point that is mentioned in the introduction explaining why we think it’s possible to build high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor for $17 billion: the current investment program, Connect 2037, centers renewal and maintenance more than expansion, under the moniker State of Good Repair (SOGR). In essence, megaprojects have a set of well-understood problems of high costs and deficient outcomes, behind-the-scenes maintenance has a different set of problems, and SOGR combines the worst of both worlds and the benefits of neither. I’ve talked about this before in other contexts – about Connecticut rail renewal costs, or leakage in megaproject budgeting, or the history of SOGR on the New York City Subway, or Northeast Corridor catenary. Here I’d like to synthesize this into a single critique.
What is SOGR?
SOGR is a long-term capital investment to bring all capital assets into their expected lifespan and maintenance status. If a piece of equipment is supposed to be replaced every 40 years and is currently over 40, it’s not in good repair. If the mean distance between failures falls below a certain prescribed level, it’s not in good repair. If maintenance intervals grow beyond prescription, then the asset to be maintained is not in good repair. In practice, the lifespans are somewhat conservative so in practice a lot of things fall out of good repair and the system keeps running. The upshot is that because the maintenance standards are somewhat flexible, it’s easy to defer maintenance to make the system look financially healthier, or to deal with an unexpected budget shortfall.
Modern American SOGR goes back to the New York subway renewal programs of the 1980s and 90s, which worked well. The problem is that, just as the success of one infrastructure expansion tempts the construction of other, less socially profitable ones, the success of SOGR tempted agencies to justify large capital expenses on SOGR grounds. In effect, what should have been a one-time program to recover from the 1970s was generalized as a way of doing maintenance and renewal to react to the availability of money.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2025/04/29/against-state-of-good-repair/
