The Biden administration has announced a proposal to “strengthen its Lead and Copper Rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday.
According to the White House, more than 9.2 million American households connect to water through lead pipes and lead service lines and, due to “decades of inequitable infrastructure development and underinvestment,” many Americans are at risk of lead exposure.
“There is no safe level of exposure to lead, particularly for children, and eliminating lead exposure from the air, water, and homes is a crucial component of the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic commitment to advancing environmental justice,” the Biden administration said.
Doing whole cities and streets in one go is always the better option: The crews know what they’re doing, all the material and materiel is already on site and scheduling is uncomplicated.
Norderstedt’s utility hooked up the whole city to fibre 1999 to 2002, total investment 43 million Euro for just over 80k inhabitants, roughly 540 Euro per head… but that number is a bit misleading the utility only made a loss of 10 million over that time span, or 125 Euro per inhabitant. A couple of years later all the money was recouped and they started expanding to neighbouring villages and the north of Hamburg. Asymmetric gigabit for 50 bucks (upload actually costs ISPs money while download gets paid by whoever’s upload that is which is why asymmetric makes sense even if the connection is symmetric).
Kinda hard to do nowadays as the second Deutsche Telekom gets wind of any such initiative they suddenly decide that laying down fibre to replace their copper would, after all, make economical sense. Which is the reason why elsewhere here I’m advocating for municipal monopolies: Municipalities should be able to say “ok you didn’t want to invest here, now it’s too late you don’t get to compete”.
(And just in case btw you thought T-Mobile was a grand and nice company: No it isn’t. It’s a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary. The only reason they are customer-friendly in the US is because they’re up against the baby bells there, in Germany Deutsche Telekom is the bell, created by splitting up and privatising the postal service, they own pretty much all the copper everywhere in the country).