Philly fixed a melted interstate in 12 days. Why does everything else take so long?

On an early Sunday morning in June 2023, a tanker truck filled with gasoline skidded on an exit ramp, tumbled over, and burst into flames just below one of the nation’s busiest interstates. The inferno that followed immediately severed miles of the East Coast’s most important artery, choking off a route used by countless cars and trucks. The fires were still burning on I-95 when Mike Carroll, Pennsylvania’s transportation secretary, told Gov. Josh Shapiro that, under the very best circumstances, he’d reopen the roadway in six weeks. Publicly, Shapiro and many experts posited that rebuilding would likely take much longer, turning a Philadelphia corridor traversed by 160,000 cars each day into a sluggish limbo, as they found other paths to and from work. The feats that followed have since been memorialized as a legendary if unlikely triumph of American infrastructural prowess.

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