6 ms·

I've seen the infrastructure thing come up for awhile now, and it's definitely true. In my area, as in others I've read of, they're smashing paved roads into gr

by windlep 10y ago

I've seen the infrastructure thing come up for awhile now, and it's definitely true. In my area, as in others I've read of, they're smashing paved roads into gravel roads as the paved are too expensive. The thing that fascinates me is that it feels like a forgone conclusion that infrastructure costs cannot be made cheaper. Have we really hit the most cost effective, cheapest, most sustainable method of laying/replacing sewer/gas/water lines and roads? There's no innovation left at all when it comes to making pipes that are more easily replaceable without digging the entire road up? There's no brilliant ideas left at all on how to 'pave' roads so they're smooth enough in a way that costs less money, or lasts way longer? Heck, while we're talking improvements maybe we should have a way to pave a road such that we don't have such massive runoff and its more resilient to minor settling underneath without opening large potholes. I do wonder whether the shit really hitting the fan, and massive chunks of the population having their roads smashed back to gravel might shake a few new ideas out.

jaggederest 10y ago
As the article says, there are plenty of solutions for these problems, individually. The predicament, as a whole, is that we cannot afford them. Infrastructure quality is, like so many things, directly proportionate to investment. You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa, but you can't magically reduce both at the same time while providing the same level of service. This is precisely the same problem as Terry Pratchett talked about in the boots theory of economics: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri... The problem is that the level of economic productivity supported by (for example) a strip mall is so low that it cannot support the ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure that is required to allow it to exist. This is also true for many suburban homes and office buildings. You must either extract more productive value from the same land area and population, reduce service quality, or invest massive quantities of capital in maintenance cost reduction, which has virtually the same effect as either of the previous.
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  >You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa Umm is that really true ? Maybe it is I just don't see why this would be - if anything I would guess spending more would lead to more expensive maintenance as well > but you can't magically reduce both at the same time while providing the same level of service. Not magic - innovation.
  - setrofim_ 10y ago
    >>You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa > Umm is that really true ? Maybe not universally, but often, yes. E.g., you can build using more expensive materials that will last longer/are more resistant to environmental decay.
    - jfoutz 10y ago
      asphalt vs concrete roads are a good example. of course, if you want maintain stuff under the roads, concrete is a real bear.
      - falcolas 10y ago
        And when concrete roads fall into disrepair, they get to be really nasty to drive on. I feel like I'm going to shake my car apart driving on some roads in Iowa. I can't say that asphalt roads in disrepair are much better, but potholes tend to be more quickly fixed than slightly mis-aligned sections of concrete roads.
  - michaelt 10y ago
    if anything I would guess spending more would lead to more expensive maintenance as well The idea is to buy a $100 thing that lasts 10 years, instead of a $20 thing that lasts one year, thus halving your long-term spending. Of course, not all more expensive products last longer, so careful attention to value for money is a must.
    - 10y ago
pjc50 10y ago
I think you may be too used to the tech industry where factor-of-2 improvements frequently happen overnight, or at least over a few years. > In my area, as in others I've read of, they're smashing paved roads into gravel roads as the paved are too expensive. How much traffic do these roads get? How dense is the population in the area?
VLM 10y ago
We have an infrastructure system that maximizes spending to political donor companies. Naturally under those conditions its laugh out loud obvious that its going to cost more to build roads than to build an entire city of houses. If the houses were built under the same level of government corruption as the roads, they'd cost 10x as much minimum and only last 5 years before needing teardown replacement, and then the ratio of replacement cost of structure to infrastructure would look more natural or believable. The puzzle they have is trying to fix a corrupt system. Merely replacing "evil car streets" with "progressive bicycle paths" will not fix anything, they'll just be a followup article about how horrible it is that the replacement cost of the bicycle path infrastructure curiously remains the same $32B because that's what the politically active re-election campaign donor contractors require.
- tcbawo 10y ago
  Another article by this author (http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republican-might-have-the-best-urban-transportation-plan http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republica...) describes a rejected federal proposal to hand over most federal infrastructure dollars to states, the implication being local governments would know how to allocate dollars more effectively than the federal government. The author suggests going a step further and letting majors direct the funding.
zigzigzag 10y ago
Who is going to do that innovation? A startup? Good luck getting a municipal government to take risks by handing maintenance contracts to a startup. Their incentives are to do nothing and wait to be bailed out through inflation.
- steamer25 10y ago
  +1 If you're having a hard time finding innovators in some area that has obvious utility and isn't already mathematically proven to be near-optimal, the next logical question is, "what's preventing this type of work from being monetized/incentivized?"
maxsilver 10y ago
> I've seen the infrastructure thing come up for awhile now, and it's definitely true. Sort of. I'm not convinced their infrastructure pricing is accurate at all. I fully believe infrastructure has a higher cost in the suburbs, and that we aren't fully saving for/planning for those costs. But the numbers this article uses are insanely too high, to the point that it feels like an outright lie. Strongtowns claims it costs more money to maintain the infrastructure for a single-family home (on average), than the average house would cost to build from scratch using retail pricing today (including land + construction of the house, and all of the related road/water/power/sewer infrastructure). The StrongTown estimate seems to claim it's replacing infrastructure "once a generation" (30 years?), but is charging enough money to rip-and-replace every piece of all infrastructure 6 times per generation. Which is really high -- no one does that, there wouldn't usually be any need to do so. Or to put it another way, StrongTowns is claiming that infrastructure maintenance alone costs the same as leveling the entire neighborhood and rebuilding it all from scratch at retail pricing every 30 years. Which is just outlandish -- if infrastructure actually was that expensive, 90% of these suburban houses never could have been built in the first place, even if financed using subsidy or debt.
- dpark 10y ago
  > StrongTowns is claiming that infrastructure maintenance alone costs the same as leveling the entire neighborhood and rebuilding it all from scratch at retail pricing every 30 years. This doesn't seem that surprising to me. Replacing existing utilities in place is far more expensive than laying them in the first place because you have to do it without cutting off everyone's access to water/electricity/whatever while you do it. Plus you have to work around other infrastructure and houses and dig up roads etc. And it's difficult to coordinate utility replacements so you do this stuff once for gas and later for water and again for the sewer. On top of all that, infrastructure is just terribly expensive. Price out laying a driveway. Now imagine scaling it up by maybe 10x just for the section of road in front of your house.
  - maxsilver 10y ago
    > Replacing existing utilities in place is far more expensive than laying them in the first place. Sure, but it's not 6X more expensive in the suburbs. Water / Gas lines, for instance, are often under sidewalks or yards now so you don't have to dig up the road to replace them. > because you have to do it without cutting off everyone's access to water/electricity/whatever while you do it You don't have to. When utility work gets done in the suburbs, people often just lose water / electricity / gas / whatever for the 24-48 hours while they do it, and just have to deal with it. (We're talking about sprawl -- stuff done cheap, by definition. This is not the complex operation that replacing water lines in Manhattan would be). > On top of all that, infrastructure is just terribly expensive. Price out laying a driveway. Here are some actual average costs for street construction from the State of Michigan - https://www.michigan.gov/documents/Vol2-40UIP16SubDevCosts-YardCosts-Demolition_121083_7.pdf https://www.michigan.gov/documents/Vol2-40UIP16SubDevCosts-Y... Even after adjusting for inflation, it's only about 2X the cost of a driveway, not 10x. And that's my problem with the article. It seems they took the actual cost of infrastructure, "imagined scaling it up maybe 10x", and then claimed a crisis using their imaginary costs. Real infrastructure costs, while high, are simply not anywhere near as high as they are claiming.

by windlep 10y ago

jaggederest 10y ago

As the article says, there are plenty of solutions for these problems, individually. The predicament, as a whole, is that we cannot afford them. Infrastructure quality is, like so many things, directly proportionate to investment. You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa, but you can't magically reduce both at the same time while providing the same level of service. This is precisely the same problem as Terry Pratchett talked about in the boots theory of economics: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri... The problem is that the level of economic productivity supported by (for example) a strip mall is so low that it cannot support the ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure that is required to allow it to exist. This is also true for many suburban homes and office buildings. You must either extract more productive value from the same land area and population, reduce service quality, or invest massive quantities of capital in maintenance cost reduction, which has virtually the same effect as either of the previous.

rubber_duck 10y ago
>You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa Umm is that really true ? Maybe it is I just don't see why this would be - if anything I would guess spending more would lead to more expensive maintenance as well > but you can't magically reduce both at the same time while providing the same level of service. Not magic - innovation.
- setrofim_ 10y ago
  >>You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa > Umm is that really true ? Maybe not universally, but often, yes. E.g., you can build using more expensive materials that will last longer/are more resistant to environmental decay.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    asphalt vs concrete roads are a good example. of course, if you want maintain stuff under the roads, concrete is a real bear.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      And when concrete roads fall into disrepair, they get to be really nasty to drive on. I feel like I'm going to shake my car apart driving on some roads in Iowa. I can't say that asphalt roads in disrepair are much better, but potholes tend to be more quickly fixed than slightly mis-aligned sections of concrete roads.
- michaelt 10y ago
  if anything I would guess spending more would lead to more expensive maintenance as well The idea is to buy a $100 thing that lasts 10 years, instead of a $20 thing that lasts one year, thus halving your long-term spending. Of course, not all more expensive products last longer, so careful attention to value for money is a must.
  - 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

I think you may be too used to the tech industry where factor-of-2 improvements frequently happen overnight, or at least over a few years. > In my area, as in others I've read of, they're smashing paved roads into gravel roads as the paved are too expensive. How much traffic do these roads get? How dense is the population in the area?

VLM 10y ago

We have an infrastructure system that maximizes spending to political donor companies. Naturally under those conditions its laugh out loud obvious that its going to cost more to build roads than to build an entire city of houses. If the houses were built under the same level of government corruption as the roads, they'd cost 10x as much minimum and only last 5 years before needing teardown replacement, and then the ratio of replacement cost of structure to infrastructure would look more natural or believable. The puzzle they have is trying to fix a corrupt system. Merely replacing "evil car streets" with "progressive bicycle paths" will not fix anything, they'll just be a followup article about how horrible it is that the replacement cost of the bicycle path infrastructure curiously remains the same $32B because that's what the politically active re-election campaign donor contractors require.

tcbawo 10y ago
Another article by this author (http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republican-might-have-the-best-urban-transportation-plan http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republica...) describes a rejected federal proposal to hand over most federal infrastructure dollars to states, the implication being local governments would know how to allocate dollars more effectively than the federal government. The author suggests going a step further and letting majors direct the funding.

zigzigzag 10y ago

Who is going to do that innovation? A startup? Good luck getting a municipal government to take risks by handing maintenance contracts to a startup. Their incentives are to do nothing and wait to be bailed out through inflation.

steamer25 10y ago
+1 If you're having a hard time finding innovators in some area that has obvious utility and isn't already mathematically proven to be near-optimal, the next logical question is, "what's preventing this type of work from being monetized/incentivized?"

maxsilver 10y ago

> I've seen the infrastructure thing come up for awhile now, and it's definitely true. Sort of. I'm not convinced their infrastructure pricing is accurate at all. I fully believe infrastructure has a higher cost in the suburbs, and that we aren't fully saving for/planning for those costs. But the numbers this article uses are insanely too high, to the point that it feels like an outright lie. Strongtowns claims it costs more money to maintain the infrastructure for a single-family home (on average), than the average house would cost to build from scratch using retail pricing today (including land + construction of the house, and all of the related road/water/power/sewer infrastructure). The StrongTown estimate seems to claim it's replacing infrastructure "once a generation" (30 years?), but is charging enough money to rip-and-replace every piece of all infrastructure 6 times per generation. Which is really high -- no one does that, there wouldn't usually be any need to do so. Or to put it another way, StrongTowns is claiming that infrastructure maintenance alone costs the same as leveling the entire neighborhood and rebuilding it all from scratch at retail pricing every 30 years. Which is just outlandish -- if infrastructure actually was that expensive, 90% of these suburban houses never could have been built in the first place, even if financed using subsidy or debt.

dpark 10y ago
> StrongTowns is claiming that infrastructure maintenance alone costs the same as leveling the entire neighborhood and rebuilding it all from scratch at retail pricing every 30 years. This doesn't seem that surprising to me. Replacing existing utilities in place is far more expensive than laying them in the first place because you have to do it without cutting off everyone's access to water/electricity/whatever while you do it. Plus you have to work around other infrastructure and houses and dig up roads etc. And it's difficult to coordinate utility replacements so you do this stuff once for gas and later for water and again for the sewer. On top of all that, infrastructure is just terribly expensive. Price out laying a driveway. Now imagine scaling it up by maybe 10x just for the section of road in front of your house.
- maxsilver 10y ago
  > Replacing existing utilities in place is far more expensive than laying them in the first place. Sure, but it's not 6X more expensive in the suburbs. Water / Gas lines, for instance, are often under sidewalks or yards now so you don't have to dig up the road to replace them. > because you have to do it without cutting off everyone's access to water/electricity/whatever while you do it You don't have to. When utility work gets done in the suburbs, people often just lose water / electricity / gas / whatever for the 24-48 hours while they do it, and just have to deal with it. (We're talking about sprawl -- stuff done cheap, by definition. This is not the complex operation that replacing water lines in Manhattan would be). > On top of all that, infrastructure is just terribly expensive. Price out laying a driveway. Here are some actual average costs for street construction from the State of Michigan - https://www.michigan.gov/documents/Vol2-40UIP16SubDevCosts-YardCosts-Demolition_121083_7.pdf https://www.michigan.gov/documents/Vol2-40UIP16SubDevCosts-Y... Even after adjusting for inflation, it's only about 2X the cost of a driveway, not 10x. And that's my problem with the article. It seems they took the actual cost of infrastructure, "imagined scaling it up maybe 10x", and then claimed a crisis using their imaginary costs. Real infrastructure costs, while high, are simply not anywhere near as high as they are claiming.