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

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/ 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-my-journey-from-free-market-ideologue-to-strong-towns-advocate 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-auto-orientation-rerun https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/29/the-cost-of-au... - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/9/14/lafayette-pipes-and-hydrants https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/9/14/lafayette-pipe...