Low and Slow Across America's Infrastructure: The Route

The proposed route across America's infrastructure. Click to enlarge.

Two strangers get into a 65-year-old car and set off across the U.S., looking for projects, plows and professionals dedicated to our nation’s infrastructure. This is what happens when two transportation infrastructure writers who’d never met, talk for an hour on the phone: Low and Slow Across America’s Infrastructure.

ENR’s senior transportation editor Aileen Cho and author Dan McNichol are setting off in mid-May on a real-time documentary "road trip" in a vintage 1949 Hudson automobile that symbolizes the age of the Interstate - and the effort it requires to keep it running.

Be it visiting megaprojects like the Ohio River Bridges, Appalachian public works garages, or engineering offices using the latest and greatest in high-tech tools for asset maintenance, Dan and Aileen aim to dig out the stories of the efforts by public servants and private industry to keep our aging roads, mass transit systems, airports, and water systems intact, prudently upgraded or wisely replaced, in an age of perpetual procrastination regarding federal funding.

Be sure to keep up with their progress through the heartland via blogs, tweets and video that will be posted regularly on enr.com, and in upcoming issues of ENR.

Low and Slow Across America: Tour Dates

May 13: Dan departs Boston to meet Aileen in NY
May 14-17: Tour West Point, Philadelphia, NYC
May 17: Depart NYC for Washington, DC
May 18-19: APWA event, project tours
May 19: Depart DC for Louisville, Ky.
May 21-22: Tour the Ohio River Bridges project
May 22: Louisville to St. Louis, Mo.
May 24-26: St. Louis
May 26: St. Louis to Kansas City
May 27-28: Kansas City, visit streetcar project
May 28: Kansas City to Denver
June 1-2: Denver, visit Fastracks and other local projects
June 2-3: Denver to Glenwood Springs, visit I-70 project
June 4-6: Glenwood Springs to Salt Lake City
June 8-9: Salt Lake City to Reno, Nev.
June 9-10: Reno to Sacramento, Calif.
June 10-11: Sacramento to San Francisco
June 11: Sacramento to Fresno, visit California high-speed rail project
June 12-13: Fresno to Los Angeles

This itinerary will be updated as the trip approaches. Dates and locations subject to change. If you are involved in an infrastructure project or public works department along the route and are interested in meeting the team, please contact Aileen Cho at aileen.cho@construction.com or Tudor Van Hampton at tudor.vanhampton@construction.com for details.

Aileen Cho, ENR's senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in New York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Long Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.

Post a comment to this article

60% of workers are exposed to heights greater than 5 ft daily, and workers' compensation from injury is more than $7B - it's time for construction leaders to take measures to reduce risk and create a safer work environment. We'll explore how technology can improve construction site safety and help prevent accidents before they happen.