Above and Below the Surface: A New Way of Thinking About Our Failing Streets (Part 3 of 3)

Mark Reiner, PhD, PE
Oct 9
5 min read

Updated: Oct 16

By Mark Reiner, PhD, PE and Shannon McElvaney

The Appian Way (Via Appia Antica) is an ancient Roman military road, begun in 312 BC and extended to Brindisi by about 264 BC. Built to move troops and supplies swiftly across the empire, the Appian Way still carries travelers more than two millennia later. Its return on investment is nothing short of extraordinary, an enduring testament to infrastructure built to last.

The lesson for today’s cities is not about superior Roman stonework or construction techniques. It is about changing the way we think.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The Appian Way was essentially a 2D paradigm, a flat, surface-only road. It wasn’t designed with buried pipes or cables beneath it, nor with the daily needs of the communities along its path in mind. Its function was surface mobility.

Surprisingly, our modern roads are still stuck in this 2D mindset. We treat roads mainly as traffic surfaces, while beneath them lies a maze of aging water pipes, gas lines, power cables, and telecom networks all in various states of decay. Every time one of these systems fails, the road must be torn open. The result: blocked businesses, rerouted commuters, and frustrated communities.

This is the Road and Buried Infrastructure Decay (RABID) problem, a setup where everything beneath the street is out of sight, out of mind, and falling apart at its own pace, causing repeated disruptions to the roads above. And despite road closures being so common, it is amazing that we have not yet developed key performance metrics to discuss the impact to the surrounding communities.

The 3D Shift

Real change means moving from a flat, surface-only view of the city to a 3D mindset—one that connects what happens above the road (mobility, commerce, daily life) with what happens below (the utilities and infrastructure we all depend on). In a 3D framework, these systems are brought into the light, becoming part of holistic design and everyday planning that supports mobility, land use, and community well-being and resilience.

If the Romans built a road that has lasted millennia, we can certainly create a Smart Appian Way (SAW) paradigm today, recognizing that there are Critical Urban Corridors (CUCs) where disruptions must be eliminated.

As Donella Meadows wrote, “paradigms are the sources of systems… the places to intervene in a system begin with understanding the goals of the system and the paradigm out of which the goals, rules, and feedback structure arise.” Our smart city ambitions of efficient transport, data-rich roads, and safety are not limited by technology. They’re held back by the tangled, aging systems buried beneath our streets.

The RABID baseline

Change starts with understanding the consequences of “business as usual.” The literal signs of RABID are everywhere: spray-painted markings scrawled across the pavement, endless detours, and jackhammers rattling through the night. More than a century ago, Frühling described the same problem in London: utilities digging wherever they pleased, traffic snarled, and public life disrupted. A hundred years later, little has changed. Take York Avenue in New York City. Crews have spent nearly a decade installing just 500 feet of sewer and water lines. Originally planned as a one-year project, it took almost ten. For nearby residents and businesses, that meant years of restricted access, noise, and pollution.

Multiply that by hundreds of road closures happening every day in major cities, and it becomes clear: the cost of disruption is enormous but rarely counted.

Why paradigm Matters

The inefficiencies of the RABID paradigm are well documented:

About 75% of U.S. water utilities rely on pipe breaks as their key trigger for replacement because excavation is so disruptive.
The average water main fails at just 47 years old, barely halfway through its intended lifespan, mainly because of corrosion, rushed construction, and deferred maintenance.
In New York City alone, accidental strikes on buried infrastructure cost $300 million annually.

These failures aren’t technological; they’re systemic, rooted in policy gaps and siloed professions. RABID, as we define it, is a 3D paradigm that includes roads above, utilities below, and the people who depend on both. The problem isn’t visibility; it’s ownership. It turns out, no one is accountable for managing all three together. The Smart Appian Way (SAW) approach turns that around by making the same three-dimensional reality deliberate, planned, and connected instead of disconnected and reactive.

Before cities can change, they need to understand their baseline, the current pattern of disruptions and infrastructure conditions that shape daily life.

Disruption-Free Corridors and Coordination

Moving beyond that baseline requires quantifiable, continuously updated analyses that reveal trends in infrastructure performance and the historic and predictive impacts on surrounding communities. In other words, a digital twin of the built environment that provides the insight needed to identify a city’s critical urban corridors.

We propose three complementary analyses that make this visible and measurable:

Disruption Occurrence Index (DOI): a standardized measure of where, how often, and for how long roads are disrupted.
Disruption Impact Index (DII): a planner-oriented tool that quantifies how disruptions affect communities—access to homes, businesses, transportation, buildings, and vulnerable populations.
Harmonization of key road segments: aligning data across agencies to build a shared, citywide understanding of which corridors matter most.

Together, these analyses enable cities to identify disruption-free zones, areas where closures would cause the greatest harm, using data they already collect, such as vehicle miles traveled (VMT), sales tax patterns, and historic or tourism districts.

From these analyses the CUCs emerge: the most vital arteries where disruption must not occur. These are the corridors where coordinated infrastructure investments provide the highest return in resilience, equity, and economic vitality.

A New Urban paradigm

The goal isn’t disruption-free cities everywhere, but to focus on the corridors where disruption hurts most and begin long-term strategies that include agency coordination, streamlined permitting, infrastructure hardening, sector realignment, and, where appropriate, shared utility corridors.

Donella Meadows reminds us that system change begins with paradigm change. To truly become “smart” and “resilient,” cities must shift to a new paradigm where roads, utilities, and communities are planned together rather than in silos, so that what happens below the street supports what happens above it.

The Leadership Imperative for an Actual smart city

Much of today’s smart city conversation focuses on information technology, from engagement apps and dashboards to efficiency platforms. The American Planning Association defines a smart city as one that “uses information and technology to engage citizens, deliver city services, and enhance urban systems.”

But this definition assumes a city already has reliable, disruption-free infrastructure. Information technology can make systems more efficient, but it cannot reverse decay or fix the flawed RABID setup. The potholes, broken mains, and road closures that people deal with every day are airbrushed out of the smart city vision.

As Ben Green argues in Smart Enough Cities, technology will have little impact unless it is thoughtfully embedded in the structures and paradigms that shape urban life.

Few defend the RABID paradigm, but entrenched habits and institutional silos keep it in place. Utilities often fall back on the familiar phrase, “that’s how it’s always been done.”

Overcoming this inertia takes leadership. In The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis describes the danger of societies that respond to long-term risks with short-term fixes. That is exactly the risk cities face when they continue patching roads and replacing pipes piecemeal.

Defining disruption-free zones before failures occur, using DOI and DII to measure impact, and investing in CUCs are not just technical actions; they are acts of leadership. Cities that take a proactive approach, choosing a new way of thinking instead of reacting to failure, will save money over the life cycle of infrastructure while strengthening public trust, safety, and prosperity.

That’s the real shift: it’s not about technology, it’s about perspective. When cities start to see what’s above and below as one connected system, they can build streets that work better today and last for generations.