GlobeSt blogger Jonathan D. Miller is chin deep now in the authorship of his next infrastructure study, his annual opus due out in May and sponsored by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young. So we turned to him for the commentary on last week's Quick Poll, which obviously had more to do with the state of the infrastructure of US cities than it did with Miami's blackout. Our poll-takers got that point, with only 20% blaming the outage on a Nuke Fluke, compared with the 80% who see it as Another Sign of Our Corroding Infrastructure. Miller, who is also a partner in the Manhattan-based consulting firm Miller Ryan, says that, poll stats aside, the American public doesn't yet see the danger our cities are in. Here's why:

"If Miami was a yellow flag, Katrina was a red flag and so was the Minneapolis bridge collapse, which people have largely dismissed at this point. The same is true of the 2003 Northeast/Midwest blackout. There were some improvements made, but it was pointed out that the electric grid in this country is in a backward state. There haven't been many major changes and there's no real national policy about electric power generation. It's left mostly to the private sector.

"The snafu in Miami also speaks to national security. It wouldn't take much to short out our power system. A short-out that lasts for several days could have a major impact on our economy.

"We're severely underinvested in our entire infrastructure. We have been for the past 30 years. This has much to do with political will, and that comes from all of us. Do we want to spend what we need to in order to upgrade our infrastructure? We can lose our economic competitiveness if we don't. We're basically coasting on prosperity, and we can do that for only so long.

"Of course, we're not positioned to spend on such things given the Iraq war, healthcare, social security entitlements. We're hemmed in, unless we're prepared to ante up and pay higher taxes and user fees.

"What's going to happen is that you're going to see the imposition of user fees rather than more taxes. But we have no choice. People will be spending a lot more to drive and to move around and that will come back to the real estate industry in a number of different ways. Most important, it will affect land use and where people choose to live and work and play. As a result, you'll see more urbanization.

"In all, Americans are not getting the big picture. They're starting to, but they'll truly get it only when they're willing to pay for what's necessary."