The invisible repair

A bridge that has never failed receives no praise. A bridge that fails and is rebuilt produces headlines, a ceremony and a plaque. This asymmetry quietly shapes how societies spend money on infrastructure.

Maintenance is the clearest case. Repainting steel before it rusts, replacing a bearing before it seizes and resurfacing a road before water gets into the base are all far cheaper than the repairs that follow if they are skipped. Engineers can usually give the ratio, and it is rarely less than four to one.

The difficulty is that successful maintenance produces no visible event. A politician who funds it has nothing to point at, while one who funds a new structure has a ribbon to cut. Over several decades this produces a predictable pattern: countries with a great deal of ageing infrastructure and a strong habit of building new things, because the incentives in each individual decision pointed that way.

Some agencies have tried to correct it by publishing a condition score for every asset, updated annually and visible to the public. It is a modest device and it works for one reason: it creates a number that gets worse when nothing is done, which is exactly what maintenance lacked.

The general shape is familiar from personal life. Everything that prevents a problem looks, on the day you do it, like a day in which nothing happened.