This makes it sound as if there aren’t hard choices to be made and that budgets aren’t tight. Would you rather have smooth roads, clean water, or low taxes?
Road maintenance is expensive, and tends to get deferred because of lack of funds or more important priorities. This means that road maintenance gets even more expensive. People then like to criticize the city for not fixing things when it would have been cheaper.
We like the narrative that government is wasteful and stupid and has all the money it needs to maintain everything in the city. Sometimes it is lazy and stupid, but mostly (especially at the city level) it is not.
When there isn’t money to do work, the government doesn’t do work—even if there’s work to do. Until we allow enslavement of government workers, this will continue.