The world's top cities with the best infrastructure

A new ranking of the most livable cities in the world was recently released by Mercer, an HR consultancy. One component of the ranking is a city's infrastructure, including transportation. Helpfully, they also release a ranking based purely on infrastructure. The results are striking. No US cities rank in the top ten. Three out of the top five in the Americas are Canadian cities (the other two are Atlanta and Washington, DC). This is not to say that US cities are inherently less competitive than those higher in the rankings, but it may, at the very least, indicate a perhaps serious competitive vulnerability, while highlighting the benefits possible from infrastructure improvement.

Key factors in Mercer's assessment were congestion levels, international air connections, and the availability of public transportation options. These are not necessarily appropriate goals for national policies focused on cities, but they do represent outcomes of specific policies. Congestion and public transport are intricately tied to land use policies, pricing policies, and long term investment decisions. Air connections are, in part, affected by intermodal connections to airports and easy connections with downtowns. Moreover, these outcomes that Mercer measures are, in many ways, means to bigger goals such as economic growth, environmental protection and national connectivity. Those are the sort of national policy goals that the National Transportation Policy Project advocates for, and such a federal approach would certainly induce the sort of outcomes that Mercer looks so favorably upon.