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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting a bit tired of seeing these bizarre and unsupported screeds from strongtowns. The idea that infrastructure is bankrupting the american city/town is totally unsupported. Spending on things like roads is a small percentage of government. As a random cite, the Urban institute puts it at 6%:

https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

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Figures like that are not how much cities need to spend to maintain everything they have, but how much they choose to spend on maintenance in a single year. The problem is almost every city engages in deferred maintenance - ie. they don’t spend enough to maintain everything they had and somewhere between many to most roads are allowed to deteriorate.

At the state and federal level the ASCE reports on this every four years: https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

They claim that actual funding, just for roads, is 981 Billion while the need is 2 trillion.

Again that’s just for roads.

Usually there’s one comment like this on each Strong Towns thing that gets on hacker news, and I get it, this crowd wants to dig into the numbers. The challenge is that StrongTowns is a blog which posts bite sized bits of content every day, And their audience is a very broad national readership of “regular folks” whose eyes tend to glaze over when you show them a spreadsheet. So a lot of the Strong Towns daily posts are narrative centric like this without being focused on the data.

EDIT: I had to dig a bit, but this series is more spreadsheet-y, and probably of more interest to the HN crowd: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/12/17/best-of-2019-...

Also these articles are pretty good intro pieces:

- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/29/the-cost-of-au...

- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/9/14/lafayette-pipe...

>They claim that actual funding, just for roads, is 981 Billion while the need is 2 trillion.

So we need to double spending to 12% of state/local expenditures? Even if we accept that number it's just not anywhere near the level of bankrupting cities.

> Spending on things like roads is a small percentage of government.

I believe ST's point is that this is only true because cities and towns use cash accounting, and so the depreciation costs of roads and other infrastructure are hidden. Once these wear out and have to be replaced, these cities will find themselves in a very deep hole.

Note that cash accounting is so misleading that it's literally illegal for most companies to use it; municipalities get to be an exception because it helps tax cuts seem more viable than they really are, and voters want to be lied to in this way.

Roads don’t wear out and “have to be replaced”. They are continuously maintained, which coincidentally fits perfectly with cash accounting.

When they are maintained by resurfacing on a 15-20 year lifecycle, and regrading on a 50 year lifecycle, as is common with residential roads, that leaves plenty of time for ponzi-like growth to occur.

Bridges do, however.

Road are also listed on city books as an asset, with a positive cash value, instead of a liability. But unfortunately, future road maintenance is a liability just like future pension payments, and cities can’t actually sell roads to pay for other things. That future payment is generally not accounted for anywhere by any city.

The accounting practices around infrastructure are quite surprisingly bad.

roads certainly do need to be replaced, i.e., repaved. in my three weeks of travel in china, i never once encountered a single road worse than the roads i encounter everyday in a major metropolitan city in the u.s. and i pay heavy taxes.

That's a nice fantasy world you live in.

In reality the "continuous maintenance" you tout is continually deferred, kicking the can down the road (no pun intended). The Volcker Alliance estimated that we have a total of over $1 trillion in deferred maintenance as of last November [1]. The Department of Interior alone quoted $16.4 billion in deferred maintenance on their infrastructure at the end of 2018 [2], which is about 80% of their annual budget [3]. The infrastructure of cities, states, and other federal departments dwarfs that of DoI.

[1] https://www.volckeralliance.org/sites/default/files/attachme...

[2] https://www.doi.gov/ocl/deferred-maintenance-backlog

[3] https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/uploads/fy2020_bib_a...

Government pensions on the other hand...

USPS has pensions covered! :-/ though that is 0 taxpayer dollars.

cries in Chicagoan

Cash Spending != Costs, and that is the point. Cash accounting is hiding the massive maintenance and depreciation costs that are accumulating.

In a nutshell, what is the Strongtowns thesis?

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