Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
I’m not a big city suburbanite nor can I afford a $40,000 car.
I’m not sure what small towns are collapsing under the weight of roads, though I’m sure its a problem for some.
Our biggest financial issue is an unnecessarily bloated police force. The state maintains the major roads here and many smaller roads are private, dirt, maintained by an HOA, etc. Though yes, some areas have some potholes, though not nearly as bad as those in large cities I visit like Memphis or Louisville.
Also small cities, within the town center are perfectly walkable and small enough that we don’t really need a bus. But to get to that walkable area, you need a car.
If you and your buddies want to invest and run a train though every small town in the US, I’m all for it.
However,
"Mass transit is how you create large population centers. "
Some of use don’t want large population centers or we’d live in the city and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I’m not sure what small towns are collapsing under the weight of roads
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The ASCE’s 2017 Infrastructure Report Card notes that at least 27 states have “de-paved” roads in the past five years in order to reduce ongoing maintenance costs. In one particularly notable example, Stutsman County, North Dakota — which spends $32,000 per year on each mile of their 233-mile asphalt road network — estimates that if those same roads were de-paved, the cost per mile of maintenance would drop to just $2,600.
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David Hartgen, lead author of the Annual Highway Report, notes that a few states are “really falling behind on maintenance and repairs.” And there’s an estimated countrywide road maintenance backlog of $420 billion.
Telling townships to maintain large, far flung asphalt road networks is demanding the impossible.
Our biggest financial issue is an unnecessarily bloated police force.
In biggest municipalities that’s true. But then the largest time sink for police is… traffic enforcement.
If you and your buddies want to invest and run a train though every small town in the US, I’m all for it.
Much of the rail infrastructure already exists, although cities have been cannibalizing it to expand the highway capacity for decades. Show me a small town in America that’s older than 50 years and I’ll show you the rail line that runs through it.
But getting permission to actually use it? That’s not a money problem. It’s a politics problem.
Come to think of it, the town in from had a train, as did most of the neighboring towns.
That is until they ripped all of them up to make bike paths. Florida Rails to Trails I think it was called. And they did a half-assed job in a lot of places, just ripping up the rails and then not really providing or maintaining the “trail” part.
Texas has a similar program, although the trails through Houston are at least decent enough to bike on.
But I’m more thinking of the plan for the Houston Blue Line, which was defunded under Tom DeLay back in 1994. A commercial line running from Katy to downtown was literally just sitting there unused, and Shelia Jackson Lee had an earmark to turn it into a passenger rail system. It passed through half a dozen smaller communities west of the city and would have drastically reduced congestion into the bigger shopping districts.
After the federal funds were stripped, the city tried to go at it alone, under a succession of Dem mayors. But just as Bill White was getting ready to sign off on the overhaul, Governor Rick Perry claimed the track as part of a state-backed toll road extension. The entire line was torn out practically overnight, to be transformed into the Westpark Tollway at enormous state and federal expense over the next five years. It became one of the most expensive-per-mile toll roads in the country when it was finished - around $15 to $20 (surge pricing!) travel less than five miles and still managed to lose money for the private operator, who had to be bailed out by the state a decade later.
Now both the Westpark toll road and the even bigger, more expensive I-10 “managed lanes” have private commercial bus programs to bring people into downtown from the suburbs. That’s the closest we’re allowed to have to mass transit in my city. But if you ask why, you’ll get an earful about how its unfair to rural folks for anyone else to use a vehicle that holds more than six people. You’ll even get this explanation while sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic behind a six car pile-up at the 59/610 interchange.
