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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

> "Ideally, there won't be any new highway capacity built because we can't afford to maintain what we have"

It's not a detail that changes the conclusion, but I want to focus on it:

The U.S. definitely can afford to maintain its roads. The country is the richest in the history of the world, richer than it's ever been. U.S. GDP in 1960, when the Interstate Highway system and many suburbs and malls were being built, was ~$3 trillion in real dollars;[0] now it's ~$18 trillion.

The U.S. chooses not to maintain its infrastructure.

[0] According to one unofficial source on the web, which I'm going to trust for this purpose.

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Strong Towns has written extensively on this. Their conclusion is that our infrastructure is not affordable because too many roads are built to non-dense areas that do not have the tax base to support them.

Federal highway dollars get dropped in to build, but then no dollars are available to maintain.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/2/five-ways-feder...

That argument is bunk, because the high density areas are the ones struggling. That is literally an argument for suburbia. State and federal funds do a great job outside of cities.

In my state (New York), US and state designated highways are maintained by the state if it isn't located in an incorporated city. So my city (Albany) can barely afford trucks to plow the snow, but you literally cross the city line and an army of DOT trucks are plowing. Long Island is a great example of this, as "towns" with 300k people aren't incorporated, so they get "free" services.

Even sewers are the same story. It's way more expensive to maintain buried infrastructure in the city and very cheap in the burbs. Fewer connections == fewer excavations == less labor.

I have a couple issues with your post.

First up, you seem to be conflating the source of infrastructures funding (state vs city) in an area with whether the population of that area could without external funding pay for their infrastructure.

And secondly, while maintaining buried infrastructure in the city is likely more expensive, your argument presents no claim that it is more expensive _per capita_.

edit: see http://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/0... for some numbers on the last point

Sustainability of infrastructure is all about the funding stream. I'm an IT Director guy with a healthy six figure salary. It's sustainable for me to spend too weeks on the beach every year. If I made $50k and had a $2000/mo mortgage, that would not be sustainable.

In my city, a tax/ratepayer base of 100,000 people bear the burden of supporting hundreds of miles of streets and other infrastructure. Guess what? They cannot afford it.

1 mile away, most of those costs are supported by 20 million state taxpayers.

This is precisely the same as the problem with schools. My City School District is struggling to get funding to cover basic services because they have to deal with a larger, poorer and sicker student body. That district one mile away is debating whether or not they should have a full size Olympic swimming pool or not. No poor folk, fewer disabled kids who need expensive intervention and a larger tax base.

I'm not sure what your argument is. The original point was that rural and suburban infrastructure maintenance is more expensive per capita than urban infra maintenance. The fact that urban centers are paying for maintenance of suburban and rural infrastructure on top of their own maintenance only further makes that same point.

In other words, high-density areas are effectively subsidizing low-density areas while not having their own needs met.

If the State pays for services in unincorporated areas, it should still pay for those services in incorporated areas. The only difference should be in management - that the State manages the budget for unincorporated areas, but the municipalities manage the budget for incorporated areas.

If municipalities are expected though to raise their own taxes to pay for these services, then the tax base can't afford it, because they're already paying to maintain the rural infrastructure through the higher State taxes.

Just as the parent poster says, the U.S. chooses not to maintain its infrastructure. The infrastructure is not affordable by many municipalities, but that same infrastructure is affordable by U.S. as a whole.

They could subsidize the infrastructure required to integrate the country and keep the non-dense areas viable even if these areas don't have the local tax base to pay for that infrastructure, just as they did with federal highway dollars when they were built, just as many other countries are doing. It's a choice to do so or not. The rules of who pays for maintenance of which parts of infrastructure are essentially arbitrary and the U.S. can alter them if they choose to.

Not from the US, but I lived there shortly and was asked to move there and had to decline. To me it's pretty clear that your single biggest problem is your suburbs and car culture. Everything from anti-social behavior, social anxiety snd isolation, depression, obesity, diabetis, divorce, as well as partisan politics stems from it. Subsidizing that mess should be the last thing you should do.

Other countries subsidize rural areas primarily for 3 reasons: 1. Certain political parties have their base in rural areas and want to subsidize their life style. 2. Strategie for making the country more food-independant through farming. 3. Military strategie for having people in remote areas.

Nobody in the world subsidizes non-productive suburban sprawl.

I think you captured it with "1. Certain political parties have their base in rural areas and want to subsidize their life style."

The suburbs are politically very important in the U.S. because a lot of people live there. The question of most national elections is whether the suburbs will ally with the urban core or the rural areas, and the answer is usually the rural areas.

That's true in some sense, but it's also true that we've built our infrastructure in a way that's very expensive. Car dominance and low-density sprawl don't come cheap.

It's like saying a poor person CAN afford a new iPhone if they just only start eating only rice and beans, and therefore iPhones are affordable for the poor. It's not just about whether the cost can fit the budget, but about what you're getting for that cost.

IIRC, gas tax comes pretty close to paying for roads - as in, its not enough, but not an order of magnitude off.

Roughly half, though this varies widely and is prone to differences of opinion on what counts as paying for roads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...

https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...

Aside from the fact that this isn't really true, you have to also account for many externalities that car dominance creates:

- Land use. While every transportation mode uses land, cars use way more, and in dense urban areas that land is very valuable; users of the land who are driving are getting it 'for free', when it could go to a more productive purpose.

- Pollution

- Noise

- Danger

All of these are 'costs' that just looking at how much money you spend on roads won't account for.

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