It has begun to be common to read about freeways, highways, bridges, railroads and even cruise ship disasters. In virtually all these cases the problem is a lack of maintenance.
The Golden Gate Bridge is a shining example of good maintenance. The bridge is now 75 years old. Every year since it was built it has been scraped and painted and repainted. Nearly the entire six dollars per car that is collected goes toward maintenance of the bridge.
The same cannot be said about any other piece of public steel in America. While the Golden Gate Bridge has to deal with an ocean environment, it is not significantly more vulnerable than all the other man made steel objects in America.
Throughout my life, until the 1980s, when German and Japanese cars began to impact automobile design in the United States, American cars were notoriously unreliable.
Both the Japanese and the German engineers understand the nature of maintenance. Their cars introduced the requirement that new cars be serviced regularly at factory authorized facilities. Regular service is a synonym for maintenance.
Maintenance begins in design. If the object is not designed for easy maintenance it will not occur.
From my own personal experience I have learned what maintenance is about. I had an Aston Martin Lagonda, which was a sedan designed for high power. The only access to the spark plugs required the removal of the engine. British. I also had an MGA sports car. The electrical harness looked like spaghetti and when it began to be a problem, no one could figure out which wire went where.
I worked on a French Fuga fighter plane that had a stick of dynamite under the pilot's seat for ejection purposes. The dynamite had to be replaced every 100 hours. A major job that was an example of French maintenance and design incompetence. I had a French motorscooter with oversized rubber shock absorbers that wore out in less than five years.
The New York subway system had come to a virtual standstill by the early 1990’s when a transportation expert from Canada was brought in to fix the system. The first thing he did was install a reliable maintenance system. That made the subway system functional.
When you compare airplane safety to automobile safety in the 1950s and 60s you can understand the high level of safety of airplanes because they have a high level of scheduled maintenance that is enforced by government agencies.
In the contemporary world, where America remains pretty much a Third World country, part of our problem has to do with lack of understanding of maintenance. Without maintenance most man-made objects are destined to fail at a precipitous rate.