The American Society for Civil Engineering has created a nifty interactive website about the state of infrastructure in America at http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/.

The website is appealing to look at and intuitive to use if you’re curious about, in this case, how poor American infrastructure really is in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Bottom-line: America gets a failing grade, but only-just-failing at a D+.

For STS scholars, this might be one of those great cases in the rough that could bring the “assessment” or “accounting” literature together with infrastructure studies given that the infrastructures must be defined in order to be counted and compared, and, as such, provides a right backdrop upon with some solid STS-oriented research could start from … and STSers will no doubt love this “grading rubric” available at the sight to legitimize and justify the grading standards. Also, of particular interest to scholars like Jan-Hendrik and I (along with our friends Stefanie Fishel (guest blogger emeritus), Govind Gopakumar, Kathryn Furlong (also guest blogger emeritus), and Patrick Carroll, there is a section that breaks-up scores according to states … nice, no?

In all, this is one of the places where an STS orientation might just be of serious government interest again …