47 ms·

We need to do the math, even on “small” projects

373 points by oftenwrong 6y ago

alex_young 6y ago
Somehow we afford paving streets in cities. I wonder how that happens when the math is always so bad? Perhaps it's because we socialize the cost since the paved road benefits more than the immediate houses on that block.
- civilian 6y ago
  "Somehow we afford paving streets in cities" There's two explanations: 1. Previously, the streets were simply pavement and a ditch. Now they're being upgraded to pavement-sidewalk-internaldrainage-internet-power. It's more expensive and potentially unsustainable. 2. We can't afford it, b/c we're relying on all of these bonds. If _every_ block in the city requires a bond that the property tax from that block can't pay, eventually the banks will recognize that this city isn't a good debitor. But furthermore, is this the best use of funds? Is adding a sidewalk worth 1.5m, when it could be spent elsewhere?
  - inetknght 6y ago
    Or a third explanation as @frisco's comment [0] suggests; the price tag is bloated [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566731
- cagenut 6y ago
  thats true in many scenarios but basically untrue in cul-de-sac style designed communities.
- jariel 6y ago
  So the people living in small, dense dwelling and apartments can foot the bill for the nice roads of the folks with big properties ... I wonder how the dynamic would change if all 'access roads' i.e. roads with homes on them, and not 'artery roads' had to be paid for by the local neighborhood.
  - burlesona 6y ago
    This has been considered. For example, Virginia greatly restricted cul-de-sacs[1], and my understanding is that the mechanism by which they accomplished this is changing the rules so that only "through streets" would be eligible for public maintenance going forward, hence if you had a cul-de-sac or private loop road or something you had to maintain it yourself. But I think that's only forward-looking, it doesn't change things for all the private roadways built in the past. 1: https://www.planetizen.com/node/37942 https://www.planetizen.com/node/37942
    - xxpor 6y ago
      The way VA does road maintenance is wildly different than nearly every other state though. Every road outside of independent cities is state maintained. Not county or town, but full state maintenance. It makes it much easier to do these types of changes.
- burlesona 6y ago
  There are a number of factors, but the simplest gist: 1. The models for road funding and development were developed in the 1920s and 30s, were based on much denser areas (old towns) that paid a lot higher taxes per acre, and much simpler roads (which cost a lot less). 2. The models haven't been significantly updated or reconsidered since, even though the development patterns have been mandated by law to become much less dense, while street standards have also greatly increased, meaning much less tax base to support much more infrastructure. 3. This often pencils out in places that are growing because there are heavy state and federal subsides for "growth" projects where the up front capital cost is 80-100% paid for by non-local funds. That infrastructure works without maintenance for a while, and likely won't need heavy maintenance for 20-30 years, but at that point it'll need to be rebuilt at about the same cost adjusted for inflation as it cost to build. In theory what should be happening is cities should be piling up money from taxes on these projects that were subsidized, so that when the maintenance bill comes due they have the funds to do the maintenance. But in practice, the taxes that come in from "today's" new growth are used to pay for the maintenance on "yesterdays" old infrastructure that needs to be replaced. Thus, things appear to "work" as long as steady growth continues and new tax income continues to be generated locally while the costs associated are funded from outside. But when growth slows down or stops, things quickly break down. You can see this pattern of "rolling blight" all over the country, where so many of the older suburbs are falling apart with decaying infrastructure, and people who can are moving farther out to the "shiny and new" suburbs where everything is in good shape. The problem is especially pernicious in the rust belt, where we have seen metro areas dramatically expand in surface area every decade even as their population has barely increased (or shrunk) since the 1950s.
  - ssivark 6y ago
    > The models haven't been significantly updated or reconsidered since, even though the development patterns have been mandated by law to become much less dense, while street standards have also greatly increased, meaning much less tax base to support much more infrastructure. This sounds like the utter lack of critical thinking which might result in a failing grade for a college term paper, so what gives? As in, what is the thinking with which sane people could justify using such models and/or approving estimates?
- jkingsbery 6y ago
  It's worth reading the Strong Towns book that goes into this in more detail. We haven't always afforded paving streets in cities. Many cities started with dirt roads in a small settlement. As the settlement grows, the investment in roads (sometimes) begins to make sense. As that investment happens, you can see over time an increase in the quality of buildings and population density. Perhaps you still disagree with it, but the point is that towns routinely make infrastructure improvements for which there is no cost socialization that makes the improvement worthwhile over the improvement's lifetime. You're right to suggest there is some benefit. In the example from the article, however, another street is used as the through street, so the benefit to people in other parts of the town from this road being improved is vanishingly small. It would not be worth however much their taxes would go up. You can also socialize across time through borrowing money, but in this case you would get 30 years worth of road for 35 years worth of money. It's an interesting book, because it does not even suggest that socialized costs or central government planning are bad in themselves, only that the way we're socializing costs is setting up our towns for bankruptcy.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Density matters. How many people need that road, i.e. how many people live on these 0.3 miles of road? It's not a through route, so it does not benefit much more people than that. How many people live on 0.3 miles of city streets lined with multi-story buildings? That makes all the difference in how the math works out.
karlmcguire 6y ago
> So, if we can't stop the project from happening, what can we do? > 1. Do nothing. Assume that you will be able to grow and borrow forever. The Fed is buying individual corporate bonds now. The only thing keeping this American experiment afloat is borrowing forever.
- gavindean90 6y ago
  I mean, not really, this is just better than the alternatives. Also we own the currency it's not the same.
sroussey 6y ago
Author discusses their nice daily walks on that street, and questions the need for improvements like sidewalks and ADA compliance. Author should be thankful to not need the ADA compliance.
- hyperpape 6y ago
  I would like a post that is clearer on this. Can you get ADA compliance without the full cost of the project? Would that be reasonable? However, regardless, if you cannot pay for ADA compliant sidewalks with existing tax revenue, then paying for them piecemeal using unsustainable bonds seems like it's only pushing the problem out.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    "unsustainable bonds" is the foundation of suburban development.
    - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
      Apparently so and it’s something the articles website is highly critical of.
  - superbatfish 6y ago
    I'm also wondering about this. Maybe some "outside-the-box" ideas could achieve it. Just spitballing here: If the street were made to be one-way instead of two-way, could it be narrower, leaving room for the sidewalk AND the ditches? Also, it isn't clear from his description, but maybe that would eliminate the need for "additional utilities improvements due to [the sidewalk and widening]". It would inconvenience the residents on that street and motorists who pass through. But presumably that's better than bankruptcy. Or here's an even crazier idea: Could the underground drainage be avoided if the city annexed a strip of land from the adjacent properties? That would surely piss them off, but if it were implemented city-wide, as part of a "we're all in this together" kind of campaign to revitalize the city without going bankrupt, maybe it would be more palatable. At least it might seem more "fair" if everyone loses a little land, rather than only some streets. And if owners were compensated monetarily, heck, some might even like it.
frisco 6y ago
There is another degree of freedom here: project cost. Why on earth does 0.32 miles of residential road cost $1.5M? Having just managed a construction project much larger than this stretch of road myself, I am certain that a lot of the blame here lies with the contracting process as well as outrageous fees (and just sheer inefficiency) from the engineers and contractors. There is no valid reason this should be so expensive. In the rest of the world, I guarantee you they are not paying over a million dollars for something like this and their standards are just as high if not higher. I’m not sure there is an opportunity to fix this - I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this now and modeling it out - by building a better construction company: most of the problem is, instead, essentially political.
- Elof 6y ago
  I have a family member that works for a heavy civil construction company and it sounds like it's a combination of politics and... wait for it, corruption
- zachthewf 6y ago
  Fascinating. Why don't you think it's possible to build such a construction company? (I have no experience in construction.)
  - saghm 6y ago
    I read their comment more as saying that building a better construction company wouldn't fix the issue (e.g. they might not get hired), not that it wasn't possible to build a better company.
    - bvandewalle 6y ago
      I think you hit the nail on the head. Elected officials unfortunately don't have that much incentive to hire the "cheapest" company as the debt will be incurred over the next 100 years while they will be long gone. They probably hire the company that they feel will give them the least amount of trouble, which is the easiest to navigate or that will do something for them in exchange. It's the "not my money" issue at play.
lxe 6y ago
> Yearly Property Tax Paid to City in Project Area: $44,030 Why is this being calculated based on the project area tax contribution only?
- idreyn 6y ago
  Presumably as a nod towards scalability, on the assumption that in aggregate it ought not take more than the entire town's property tax revenue to keep the town's roads in good condition.
- ssivark 6y ago
  Because other areas will have their own projects (definitely, over the lifetime of the loan, even if not right now), and you can’t make one pay for the other to be long-term sustainable.
- burlesona 6y ago
  Because if the numbers don't work on overhauling a single block based on the tax revenue generated by that block, they also don't scale up to work if you draw the tax revenue in from "elsewhere." Everywhere else ALSO has its own road, sewer, etc. to maintain, not to mention fire and EMS services.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- hinkley 6y ago
  If either of these roads serve as an arterial, then the footprint of the change is quite a bit bigger and you are correct, we should consider a wider tax base reflecting the radius of the impact of the roads. If however it's mostly a residential road, which it seems like it might be, then the scalability point being made by the other responses is probably closer to the truth.
treis 6y ago
These guys suck at actually doing the math. Property taxes won't remain constant. They will rise with inflation while the bond repayment stays the same.
- munk-a 6y ago
  On average property taxes will increase - in some areas they will decrease. If everyone is betting on their local tax pools increasing there are going to be some big losers.
- scott00 6y ago
  I was also annoyed by that. However he didn't include interest in his repayment numbers either, and the two errors roughly offset.
  - treis 6y ago
    I'm not an expert, but usually bonds are bought at a discount. The city would sell 1.5 million worth of bonds for 1.3 million, for example. The effective interest rate comes from that discount. That said, they don't seem to provide a lot of details and I've seen some wildly misleading numbers from Strongtowns. They're not to be trusted to provide objective numbers.
- brockwhittaker 6y ago
  We largely live in an inflation-free environment right now, so I just don't believe that argument necessarily, as I might have twenty years ago. 30 years of 1% inflation = 26% diminished buying power 30 years of 4% inflation = 70% diminished buying power
  - Invictus0 6y ago
    We can expect 3-4% inflation for the next 5 years as a result of the Fed's stimulus programs.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
jmpman 6y ago
The author seems to suggest that the maintenance of the road 30 years from now will cost as much as the current major reconstruction. I expect the maintenance of a 30 year old road is significantly less. I’d determine the bond required to provide the equivalent maintenance over 30 years, levy a one time charge against the individual properties (as a lien against the property value of needed), equal to the total costs minus the expected post 30 year maintenance costs. Then issue a bond for the expected 30 year maintenance costs. Eventually the properties will pay off the lien, and have a predictable yearly bond. Propose that to all the impacted property owners, let them vote on it, and go with a majority rule. If the property owners expect their property values to increase more than the lien, they should vote for it, if not, it’s an inefficient use of resources and they should vote against it.
- hadlock 6y ago
  The road in front of my childhoom home was originally built to the blog post author's "new" standard, and then replaced after 30 years. Rebuilding the road involved breaking up the concrete, laying new rebar, and pouring the concrete. This happened over a period of about three days. I think the road was drivable on day five once the concrete had set. Since the concrete comes out in great big chunks, the mould is already ready for the concrete to be poured. It was pretty fast, I think they really had to work to even stretch it out into a three day project. That said, this project in the blog post is a total upgrade of the street, what exists currently is two ditches, which are probably a mosquito spawning ground several months a year, and in the middle is asphalt on top of dirt which is a small step up from a dirt road. The end result of curbs, concrete road and ADA-compliant sidewalk is huge. People will want to move to this neighborhood after the upgrade goes in. With the bare strip of asphalt, the curb-appeal of the houses in this neighborhood is quite low. Also also, concrete residential roads typically have a 40 year lifespan, not 30. My town could have easily ground down the top 1/2" of concrete road surface for a fraction of the price and gone another 10 years without any further maintenance.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Concrete roads aren't as good where it winters. They shift as the ground changes temperature and expands or contracts, and trucks and plows destroy them at the seams.
centimeter 6y ago
Has anyone done a high-quality analysis on the actual cost of implementing ADA compliance, both in public and private contexts? There are going to be a lot of social and opportunity costs that are hard to capture (e.g. the social losses associated with fewer swimming pools due to high ADA-related costs), but even the raw construction costs would be interesting.
jpm_sd 6y ago
Off-topic: I have developed a habit of hitting Esc when modal dialogs pop up on web pages as I'm scrolling down reading. I never want to sign up for the mailing list. The webinar. The sales pitch. Never. But on sites hosted by Squarespace, Esc gets you into a login prompt, presumably for the site owners? Try it! Weird choice, Squarespace!
- newswasboring 6y ago
  I too was very weirded out by this. The worst part is I couldn't even figure out that esc was doing this till I read your comment. Esc is usually used to stop or close something, not open something new.
supernova87a 6y ago
There is a good article in the Atlantic (I will try to dig it up) about how the relatively unexplainable reasons (or maybe, lazily not explained reasons) why construction and public infrastructure projects in our country are costing so much (billions of $ more than you would expect), is really hindering our development and collective wealth as a country (wealth in terms of infrastructure, modernity of our facilities). The example was the rail development of the 2nd Ave subway line in Manhattan, but take almost any example of a large project. Think about how, if the cost of our projects is 2-3x what it "should be", we are doing without 2/3-1/2 of the improvements to our physical world that we could otherwise achieve. For some reason, it's a confluence of aging infrastructure, cost of displacing entrenched residents / businesses to make improvements, labor cost, insurance, etc. What it also produces is a country that does not have a lot of practice in doing big, important infrastructure projects. Maybe once every 10 years. Compared to growing younger countries where they have major projects, say, every other month. And as a result, fewer experts are around to bid for such work, and also as a result, the cost of such projects goes up. It's a big problem as a country ages and gets more expensive. Some articles: - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new-york-second-avenue-subway-phase-2 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne... - https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/05/07/why-is-second-avenue-subway-phase-2-so-expensive/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/05/07/why-is-second-... And this article is not specifically on the problem of cost, but how replacing signals in the NYC subway has lessons like managing a massive software project: - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-dont-we-know-where-all-the-trains-are/415152/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-d...
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  > confluence of aging infrastructure, cost of displacing entrenched residents / businesses to make improvements, labor cost, insurance, etc. What about corruption e.g. ghost employees, inflated billing rates, intentional delays, knowingly letting things be done wrong according to a mistaken spec to bill more hours later, all done by a company owned by the mayor's cousin? Construction is famous for those kinds of things.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Lots of city infrastructure changes are under the assumption that the city may keep growing. So revenues keep growing, and the money borrowed today may seem small tomorrow. Its a ponzi scheme. But with population growth pretty much constant for a century, this has worked in lots of towns. Now with the new norm being replacement (families have 2 or fewer children), the assumption is going to be challenged. The infrastructure-debt bubble may burst.
- asdff 6y ago
  All but the eastern U.S. is growing in population.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Yeah but the growth rate is half or a third what it once was, and declining.
    - asdff 6y ago
      Even out east, we are seeing rural areas depopulate and nearby metros absorbing that local population. For instance, Columbus is often cited as a fast growing city. However, almost all of that growth is from people already living elsewhere in Ohio and moving into the city for greater economic opportunities. As a net it looks like there isn't growth or even decline, as the population of Ohio has been relatively stagnant since 1960, but it's a shift of where the population is located that is also playing out everywhere. Part of it is also due to a lower need for labor in rural areas as farming and manufacturing become more automated, and cities are increasingly centers of knowledge workers and research, rather than industrial centers. In the context of climate change, it is also better to favor investment in cities which are already well scarred by human activity, and have a lot of infrastructure and capital already in place, than to expand into or increase the existing environmental impacts on our natural and rural areas. In California, we've built to the edge of what is sensible given the fringes of civilization perennially burn to the ground.
CapriciousCptl 6y ago
So much doom and gloom in that article. The town in question is McKinney TX, and I grabbed their annual budget[1]. Property taxes make up 50% of their ex-services (water, sewer, trash, parks/rec, airport, etc) revenues. And, the bonds in question will yield ~1.5% at today's rates. In other words, less than inflation. Meanwhile, McKinney has lowered property tax rates in response to higher appraisals (inflation is a major driver of increased appraisals on balance). So, I take 2 issues with the article. First is the payback period, since property tax revenue only makes up 1/2 of the ex-services income and will increase with inflation. And second, with the idea that every area must cover its own expenses. In general commercial, high-dense and/or rich areas subsidize projects in other neighborhoods. You're going to be able to cherry-pick a project that can't be paid by its beneficiaries in every single city. [1] https://www.mckinneytexas.org/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/2210 https://www.mckinneytexas.org/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/22...
maerF0x0 6y ago
This is an idea about society I've been musing a while. As a society hits prosperity it invests in infrastructure with a limited lifespan (even if decades) and therefore there is a certain depreciation rate of infra happening each year. Eventually the infrastructure will rise such that the depreciation rate will have equilibrium with income. At that point the society cannot take on any new projects without deciding it will abandon something else. A similar thing often happens in software -- Product Managers are given scope to build projects of a certain size, but rarely does the business commit to keeping a certain percentage of engineers on to maintain the project forever. So the project decays and the customers eventually walk away. But the Product person has already moved on to other things so they're no longer accountable for the long term picture.... Just some musings, not really sure how widespread/factual it is or solutions...
- nradov 6y ago
  Sure that happens to some products but it's not inevitable. The current Microsoft Word code base has been actively maintained and enhanced for over 25 years. Customers aren't walking away yet.
  - maerF0x0 6y ago
    definitely agree there are exceptions, and microsoft certainly is exceptional in many ways...
  - kthejoker2 6y ago
    Software is more like a Ship of Theseus in a way that roads are not. That is, the cost to "switch out" one version of software for another is effectively zero, so if makes sense to "maintain" the product in perpetuity. For a road and other capital expenditures with heavy dependencies, your "lifecycle" is As few changes as possible; and then, all of it changes.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Customers aren't walking away yet. It would be interesting to see usage figures. Twenty five years ago creating a new Word document would be an almost daily occurrence for me. Now it is a rarity. I have a sense that one day it will just disappear and nobody will notice.
asdff 6y ago
A lot of roads are pure waste and should probably be reverted into simpler gravel roads, or left unmaintained. Take a look at this one in Columbus (1). You have full storm drains, nearly a mile of sidewalk, and generous street lighting, for a road that connects between the highway and the city inpound lot which closes before dark. I'm willing to bet not a single person has laid foot on that sidewalk ever, given that the neighborhood around this road is simply the impound lot and a concrete factory, connected to the outside world by a single highway connection; you couldn't walk there if you tried without hopping a fence and tresspassing somewhere. 1. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9093916,-82.9996459,3a,75y,188.68h,85.67t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1so4RiX7yjurMh9gDPKrwobQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Do4RiX7yjurMh9gDPKrwobQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D153.82936%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9093916,-82.9996459,3a,75y,1...
- xxpor 6y ago
  Meanwhile most streets in Seattle north of N 85th St still don't have sidewalks at all. The estimated cost to add them is in the billions of dollars.
  - mikestew 6y ago
    Different agency, but meanwhile King County is spending money to pave a "rails-to-trails" path near Redmond (along Willows Rd. for you locals) that I run on regularly. Until the virus thing, I have never seen another human being use the quite usable gravel trail that's there now. Probably because it's out-of-the-way, no place to park, and it parallels a major paved trail that is less than a mile away. But I'm sure someone's brother-in-law needs a paving contract.
  - bpodgursky 6y ago
    I live here, and while yeah I would sorta kinda have preferred the sidewalks from the start, I have no interest in ripping up peoples' front yards to retrofit them in. What Seattle is doing now (making a lot of streets limited-access) is way better for pedestrians than a slow, expensive, abortive sidewalk-building-and-street-reconstructing campaign.
xchaotic 6y ago
Looking at the rest of the economy, public infrastructure projects like this are the only hope to keep the economy running. Yeah there will be some paper debt on municipal books but the net benefit of the money unlocked from this is much higher. At least from an economic sense. In a perverse way the more these projects costs, the more money is redistributed.
- PostOnce 6y ago
  If a large percent of the money just goes to the few owners of the construction company and not to an army of workers, then it was all for naught, so that has to be factored in too.
- jkingsbery 6y ago
  The Strong Towns book goes into this in more detail. What you say might be the case sometimes, and when it is the case, the money unlocked is reflected in higher property taxes, so the municipal balance sheet stays even. If the town can't somehow get higher property taxes for its improvements, then it spent more money than it will make on the project. If you do that enough time, municipalities start going bankrupt. If people aren't willing to pay higher property taxes for the improvement, then it isn't really helping them.
alex_young 6y ago
Expenditures for McKinney TX [0] show streets as the third lowest cost department, accounting for under 5% of the city budget. The largest expense, like most other cities, is the police department, at nearly 25%. While smart spending is important, it's hard to see street paving as something which threatens to bankrupt this municipality. [0] https://mckinneytexas.opengov.com/transparency#/1687/accountType=expenses&embed=n&breakdown=ac4a3220-88f1-4bc2-a02c-6871819fe8e7&currentYearAmount=cumulative&currentYearPeriod=years&graph=percentage&legendSort=desc&month=5&proration=true&saved_view=5683&selection=34D386D3BDD5D267554C6CB2146EE3BF&projections=null&projectionType=null&highlighting=null&highlightingVariance=null&year=2020&selectedDataSetIndex=null&fiscal_start=2015&fiscal_end=latest https://mckinneytexas.opengov.com/transparency#/1687/account...
- jdhn 6y ago
  If there's one thing this "defund the police" movement has shown me, it's how much money is spent on police departments. I would have never guessed that the police department in McKinney would be upwards of 25% of the city budget.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    I have read that in a lot of municipalities in a few decades police and firefighters will use up 100% (and more) of the budget once they have to pay out pensions. A lot of them go into retirement at around 50 and will probably live for another 30-40 years more.
  - forrestthewoods 6y ago
    > If there's one thing this "defund the police" movement has shown me, it's how much money is spent on police departments. You have been misled. The US does not spend a crazy or obscene amount of money on the police. Government spending is a combination of local + county + state + federal. Local governments are not the primary source of funding for health or education. That’s not a bad thing. The fact that city budgets are dominated by police (and fire) has everything to do with tiers of government responsibility and nothing to do with “how much money is spent on police”. https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KnMdz38JG76qNjLfF3mv3YrIJM0=/0x0:1500x1062/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1500x1062):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20038723/Screen_Shot_2020_06_16_at_11.27.07_PM.png https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KnMdz38JG76qNjLfF3mv3YrIJM0=...
m0zg 6y ago
That's why giving the government even more money never works: it's not theirs, so a third of a mile of a road nobody uses costs $1.5M, and it will get built anyway. Because why the fuck not. An illustrative example was when after the recession the federal government allocated a shitload of federal funds for infrastructure. A busy local road which _did not need repair_ ended up getting torn down and re-paved several times to use the funds over the course of a couple of years. Why? Nobody asked the question why or did the math. There were roads immediately adjacent which did need repair, those still have potholes. Where I live it costs about $1M to install traffic lights on a simple intersection. A local hospital (which I don't even use because it's out of network with my insurance) is raising hundreds of millions of dollars for "renovations" through levies (which are, thankfully, voted down repeatedly). If I were to vote in favor, they'd still charge me hundreds of thousands of dollars if I get cancer and end up getting treated there. Same with "cancer awareness" campaigns. Dude, you're charging an arm, a leg, and a first-born already, why do you need even more money for "awareness"?
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
I get the StrongTowns argument in the US, and on my travels there it's fairly easy to see the blight rolling over. but in the UK i find it harder to spot and wondered if anyone has pointers?
toomanybeersies 6y ago
As an Australian, every time I see roads like this in the USA, they look positively third world. Potholes all over, lacking (or practically lacking) a footpath, drainage, or space for on-street parking. Pine St looks like something I'd expect to find in a developing nation in South America or Asia, not a developed industrial nation like the USA.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  a footpath This is the biggest oversight of all. It's painful to see new development with no sidewalks.
- astine 6y ago
  It doesn't take a lot of work find photographs of roads like that in Australia. This isn't a main road, it's a tiny neighborhood road. It doesn't need a lot of infrastructure and I kind of wish that more roads looked like this because they're usually a lot more pleasant than the big ones. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/CSIRO_ScienceImage_3723_Aerial_view_of_the_rural_community_of_Burrawang_in_the_Wingecarribee_Catchment_south_of_Sydney_NSW_1999.jpg/1200px-CSIRO_ScienceImage_3723_Aerial_view_of_the_rural_community_of_Burrawang_in_the_Wingecarribee_Catchment_south_of_Sydney_NSW_1999.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/CS...
- austhrow743 6y ago
  As an Australian, what sort of life have you lived where you don't think we have roads like Pine St? Have you ever left a CBD?
  - toomanybeersies 6y ago
    Sure, I've seen roads like this in tiny regional towns with half a dozen houses and a single pub, but Pine St is in McKinney, TX, roughly the same size as Bendigo or Ballarat, which don't have roads like this in residential areas.
    - astine 6y ago
Nasrudith 6y ago
I wonder how well road projects scale in terms of length - if it would be better or worse per mile to have to do 50 or 500 miles of contiguous road vs 0.32 miles. The absolute cost would be far higher of course but if it it scales slower than linear it suggests a consolidation process as more efficient or whatever the "peak efficency segment" may be.
coding123 6y ago
One simple reason these budgets get approved: Kick backs.
brudgers 6y ago
I walk both of these streets every single day with my dog and have not had any issues on either. This is the urban planning version of "works on my machine." Per the article, the project includes ADA compliant sidewalks. However, if I take off my property owner hat and put on my taxpayer hat things start to look a lot different. There's also a citizen hat. It doesn't focus on "what's in it for me." Citizens are what makes towns strong, not property owners. Not taxpayers.
- neilparikh 6y ago
  When you have finite resources, you need to make tradeoffs. We probably don't have money to make every single sidewalk in the US ADA compliant, and there are also other things the city needs to fund. Given that, it's better to focus on streets where ADA compliance would be the most useful, and that's probably not in a street like this. Here, pedestrians, cars and wheelchair users can probably just share the road given that it's not a through street. The 1.5M can then go towards funding other initiatives that would help more people.
_curious_ 6y ago
StrongTowns is an org to keep an eye on
DominikD 6y ago
I can easily walk my dog there so there's no need for the sidewalk. If you break your leg, if you're old or disabled - tough luck. I stopped reading after this ableist argument. Those overreaching regulations trying to make life easy for disabled - how are we going to pay for those? Locally we had a similar response to the idea of replacing pedestrian overpass bridges with regular crossings. Cost of maintaining the bridge and its accessibility are less important than those poor cars which may now have to stop on a red light.
sAbakumoff 6y ago
4 feet sidewalk is a joke. It is not enough to keep the social distance.
loco5niner 6y ago
> Better with some vehicles parked on the street. Most everyone would drive at a safe speed here. [author shows picture of a street so crowded with parked cars, even a single car cannot safely drive through without swerving] The author has bad taste
_bxg1 6y ago
Municipal law, spending, etc. seems to me like a ripe avenue for software being used to improve society. Here's why: most people don't even know what things are happening in their area, much less do the math to see the full picture. There's an enormous gap between what information is technically available to the public and how that information is put on people's radar so it can influence voting and activism. I feel like I've also read that, for this exact reason, municipal governments are some of the most corrupt parts of our system.

373 points by oftenwrong 6y ago

Somehow we afford paving streets in cities. I wonder how that happens when the math is always so bad? Perhaps it's because we socialize the cost since the paved road benefits more than the immediate houses on that block.

civilian 6y ago
"Somehow we afford paving streets in cities" There's two explanations: 1. Previously, the streets were simply pavement and a ditch. Now they're being upgraded to pavement-sidewalk-internaldrainage-internet-power. It's more expensive and potentially unsustainable. 2. We can't afford it, b/c we're relying on all of these bonds. If _every_ block in the city requires a bond that the property tax from that block can't pay, eventually the banks will recognize that this city isn't a good debitor. But furthermore, is this the best use of funds? Is adding a sidewalk worth 1.5m, when it could be spent elsewhere?
- inetknght 6y ago
  Or a third explanation as @frisco's comment [0] suggests; the price tag is bloated [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566731
cagenut 6y ago
thats true in many scenarios but basically untrue in cul-de-sac style designed communities.
jariel 6y ago
So the people living in small, dense dwelling and apartments can foot the bill for the nice roads of the folks with big properties ... I wonder how the dynamic would change if all 'access roads' i.e. roads with homes on them, and not 'artery roads' had to be paid for by the local neighborhood.
- burlesona 6y ago
  This has been considered. For example, Virginia greatly restricted cul-de-sacs[1], and my understanding is that the mechanism by which they accomplished this is changing the rules so that only "through streets" would be eligible for public maintenance going forward, hence if you had a cul-de-sac or private loop road or something you had to maintain it yourself. But I think that's only forward-looking, it doesn't change things for all the private roadways built in the past. 1: https://www.planetizen.com/node/37942 https://www.planetizen.com/node/37942
  - xxpor 6y ago
    The way VA does road maintenance is wildly different than nearly every other state though. Every road outside of independent cities is state maintained. Not county or town, but full state maintenance. It makes it much easier to do these types of changes.
burlesona 6y ago
There are a number of factors, but the simplest gist: 1. The models for road funding and development were developed in the 1920s and 30s, were based on much denser areas (old towns) that paid a lot higher taxes per acre, and much simpler roads (which cost a lot less). 2. The models haven't been significantly updated or reconsidered since, even though the development patterns have been mandated by law to become much less dense, while street standards have also greatly increased, meaning much less tax base to support much more infrastructure. 3. This often pencils out in places that are growing because there are heavy state and federal subsides for "growth" projects where the up front capital cost is 80-100% paid for by non-local funds. That infrastructure works without maintenance for a while, and likely won't need heavy maintenance for 20-30 years, but at that point it'll need to be rebuilt at about the same cost adjusted for inflation as it cost to build. In theory what should be happening is cities should be piling up money from taxes on these projects that were subsidized, so that when the maintenance bill comes due they have the funds to do the maintenance. But in practice, the taxes that come in from "today's" new growth are used to pay for the maintenance on "yesterdays" old infrastructure that needs to be replaced. Thus, things appear to "work" as long as steady growth continues and new tax income continues to be generated locally while the costs associated are funded from outside. But when growth slows down or stops, things quickly break down. You can see this pattern of "rolling blight" all over the country, where so many of the older suburbs are falling apart with decaying infrastructure, and people who can are moving farther out to the "shiny and new" suburbs where everything is in good shape. The problem is especially pernicious in the rust belt, where we have seen metro areas dramatically expand in surface area every decade even as their population has barely increased (or shrunk) since the 1950s.
- ssivark 6y ago
  > The models haven't been significantly updated or reconsidered since, even though the development patterns have been mandated by law to become much less dense, while street standards have also greatly increased, meaning much less tax base to support much more infrastructure. This sounds like the utter lack of critical thinking which might result in a failing grade for a college term paper, so what gives? As in, what is the thinking with which sane people could justify using such models and/or approving estimates?
jkingsbery 6y ago
It's worth reading the Strong Towns book that goes into this in more detail. We haven't always afforded paving streets in cities. Many cities started with dirt roads in a small settlement. As the settlement grows, the investment in roads (sometimes) begins to make sense. As that investment happens, you can see over time an increase in the quality of buildings and population density. Perhaps you still disagree with it, but the point is that towns routinely make infrastructure improvements for which there is no cost socialization that makes the improvement worthwhile over the improvement's lifetime. You're right to suggest there is some benefit. In the example from the article, however, another street is used as the through street, so the benefit to people in other parts of the town from this road being improved is vanishingly small. It would not be worth however much their taxes would go up. You can also socialize across time through borrowing money, but in this case you would get 30 years worth of road for 35 years worth of money. It's an interesting book, because it does not even suggest that socialized costs or central government planning are bad in themselves, only that the way we're socializing costs is setting up our towns for bankruptcy.
PeterisP 6y ago
Density matters. How many people need that road, i.e. how many people live on these 0.3 miles of road? It's not a through route, so it does not benefit much more people than that. How many people live on 0.3 miles of city streets lined with multi-story buildings? That makes all the difference in how the math works out.

karlmcguire 6y ago

> So, if we can't stop the project from happening, what can we do? > 1. Do nothing. Assume that you will be able to grow and borrow forever. The Fed is buying individual corporate bonds now. The only thing keeping this American experiment afloat is borrowing forever.

gavindean90 6y ago
I mean, not really, this is just better than the alternatives. Also we own the currency it's not the same.

sroussey 6y ago

Author discusses their nice daily walks on that street, and questions the need for improvements like sidewalks and ADA compliance. Author should be thankful to not need the ADA compliance.

hyperpape 6y ago
I would like a post that is clearer on this. Can you get ADA compliance without the full cost of the project? Would that be reasonable? However, regardless, if you cannot pay for ADA compliant sidewalks with existing tax revenue, then paying for them piecemeal using unsustainable bonds seems like it's only pushing the problem out.
- sukilot 6y ago
  "unsustainable bonds" is the foundation of suburban development.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    Apparently so and it’s something the articles website is highly critical of.
- superbatfish 6y ago
  I'm also wondering about this. Maybe some "outside-the-box" ideas could achieve it. Just spitballing here: If the street were made to be one-way instead of two-way, could it be narrower, leaving room for the sidewalk AND the ditches? Also, it isn't clear from his description, but maybe that would eliminate the need for "additional utilities improvements due to [the sidewalk and widening]". It would inconvenience the residents on that street and motorists who pass through. But presumably that's better than bankruptcy. Or here's an even crazier idea: Could the underground drainage be avoided if the city annexed a strip of land from the adjacent properties? That would surely piss them off, but if it were implemented city-wide, as part of a "we're all in this together" kind of campaign to revitalize the city without going bankrupt, maybe it would be more palatable. At least it might seem more "fair" if everyone loses a little land, rather than only some streets. And if owners were compensated monetarily, heck, some might even like it.

frisco 6y ago

There is another degree of freedom here: project cost. Why on earth does 0.32 miles of residential road cost $1.5M? Having just managed a construction project much larger than this stretch of road myself, I am certain that a lot of the blame here lies with the contracting process as well as outrageous fees (and just sheer inefficiency) from the engineers and contractors. There is no valid reason this should be so expensive. In the rest of the world, I guarantee you they are not paying over a million dollars for something like this and their standards are just as high if not higher. I’m not sure there is an opportunity to fix this - I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this now and modeling it out - by building a better construction company: most of the problem is, instead, essentially political.

Elof 6y ago
I have a family member that works for a heavy civil construction company and it sounds like it's a combination of politics and... wait for it, corruption
zachthewf 6y ago
Fascinating. Why don't you think it's possible to build such a construction company? (I have no experience in construction.)
- saghm 6y ago
  I read their comment more as saying that building a better construction company wouldn't fix the issue (e.g. they might not get hired), not that it wasn't possible to build a better company.
  - bvandewalle 6y ago
    I think you hit the nail on the head. Elected officials unfortunately don't have that much incentive to hire the "cheapest" company as the debt will be incurred over the next 100 years while they will be long gone. They probably hire the company that they feel will give them the least amount of trouble, which is the easiest to navigate or that will do something for them in exchange. It's the "not my money" issue at play.

lxe 6y ago

> Yearly Property Tax Paid to City in Project Area: $44,030 Why is this being calculated based on the project area tax contribution only?

idreyn 6y ago
Presumably as a nod towards scalability, on the assumption that in aggregate it ought not take more than the entire town's property tax revenue to keep the town's roads in good condition.
ssivark 6y ago
Because other areas will have their own projects (definitely, over the lifetime of the loan, even if not right now), and you can’t make one pay for the other to be long-term sustainable.
burlesona 6y ago
Because if the numbers don't work on overhauling a single block based on the tax revenue generated by that block, they also don't scale up to work if you draw the tax revenue in from "elsewhere." Everywhere else ALSO has its own road, sewer, etc. to maintain, not to mention fire and EMS services.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
hinkley 6y ago
If either of these roads serve as an arterial, then the footprint of the change is quite a bit bigger and you are correct, we should consider a wider tax base reflecting the radius of the impact of the roads. If however it's mostly a residential road, which it seems like it might be, then the scalability point being made by the other responses is probably closer to the truth.

treis 6y ago

These guys suck at actually doing the math. Property taxes won't remain constant. They will rise with inflation while the bond repayment stays the same.

munk-a 6y ago
On average property taxes will increase - in some areas they will decrease. If everyone is betting on their local tax pools increasing there are going to be some big losers.
scott00 6y ago
I was also annoyed by that. However he didn't include interest in his repayment numbers either, and the two errors roughly offset.
- treis 6y ago
  I'm not an expert, but usually bonds are bought at a discount. The city would sell 1.5 million worth of bonds for 1.3 million, for example. The effective interest rate comes from that discount. That said, they don't seem to provide a lot of details and I've seen some wildly misleading numbers from Strongtowns. They're not to be trusted to provide objective numbers.
brockwhittaker 6y ago
We largely live in an inflation-free environment right now, so I just don't believe that argument necessarily, as I might have twenty years ago. 30 years of 1% inflation = 26% diminished buying power 30 years of 4% inflation = 70% diminished buying power
- Invictus0 6y ago
  We can expect 3-4% inflation for the next 5 years as a result of the Fed's stimulus programs.
  - jcranmer 6y ago

jmpman 6y ago

The author seems to suggest that the maintenance of the road 30 years from now will cost as much as the current major reconstruction. I expect the maintenance of a 30 year old road is significantly less. I’d determine the bond required to provide the equivalent maintenance over 30 years, levy a one time charge against the individual properties (as a lien against the property value of needed), equal to the total costs minus the expected post 30 year maintenance costs. Then issue a bond for the expected 30 year maintenance costs. Eventually the properties will pay off the lien, and have a predictable yearly bond. Propose that to all the impacted property owners, let them vote on it, and go with a majority rule. If the property owners expect their property values to increase more than the lien, they should vote for it, if not, it’s an inefficient use of resources and they should vote against it.

hadlock 6y ago
The road in front of my childhoom home was originally built to the blog post author's "new" standard, and then replaced after 30 years. Rebuilding the road involved breaking up the concrete, laying new rebar, and pouring the concrete. This happened over a period of about three days. I think the road was drivable on day five once the concrete had set. Since the concrete comes out in great big chunks, the mould is already ready for the concrete to be poured. It was pretty fast, I think they really had to work to even stretch it out into a three day project. That said, this project in the blog post is a total upgrade of the street, what exists currently is two ditches, which are probably a mosquito spawning ground several months a year, and in the middle is asphalt on top of dirt which is a small step up from a dirt road. The end result of curbs, concrete road and ADA-compliant sidewalk is huge. People will want to move to this neighborhood after the upgrade goes in. With the bare strip of asphalt, the curb-appeal of the houses in this neighborhood is quite low. Also also, concrete residential roads typically have a 40 year lifespan, not 30. My town could have easily ground down the top 1/2" of concrete road surface for a fraction of the price and gone another 10 years without any further maintenance.
- asdff 6y ago
  Concrete roads aren't as good where it winters. They shift as the ground changes temperature and expands or contracts, and trucks and plows destroy them at the seams.

centimeter 6y ago

Has anyone done a high-quality analysis on the actual cost of implementing ADA compliance, both in public and private contexts? There are going to be a lot of social and opportunity costs that are hard to capture (e.g. the social losses associated with fewer swimming pools due to high ADA-related costs), but even the raw construction costs would be interesting.

jpm_sd 6y ago

Off-topic: I have developed a habit of hitting Esc when modal dialogs pop up on web pages as I'm scrolling down reading. I never want to sign up for the mailing list. The webinar. The sales pitch. Never. But on sites hosted by Squarespace, Esc gets you into a login prompt, presumably for the site owners? Try it! Weird choice, Squarespace!

newswasboring 6y ago
I too was very weirded out by this. The worst part is I couldn't even figure out that esc was doing this till I read your comment. Esc is usually used to stop or close something, not open something new.

supernova87a 6y ago

There is a good article in the Atlantic (I will try to dig it up) about how the relatively unexplainable reasons (or maybe, lazily not explained reasons) why construction and public infrastructure projects in our country are costing so much (billions of $ more than you would expect), is really hindering our development and collective wealth as a country (wealth in terms of infrastructure, modernity of our facilities). The example was the rail development of the 2nd Ave subway line in Manhattan, but take almost any example of a large project. Think about how, if the cost of our projects is 2-3x what it "should be", we are doing without 2/3-1/2 of the improvements to our physical world that we could otherwise achieve. For some reason, it's a confluence of aging infrastructure, cost of displacing entrenched residents / businesses to make improvements, labor cost, insurance, etc. What it also produces is a country that does not have a lot of practice in doing big, important infrastructure projects. Maybe once every 10 years. Compared to growing younger countries where they have major projects, say, every other month. And as a result, fewer experts are around to bid for such work, and also as a result, the cost of such projects goes up. It's a big problem as a country ages and gets more expensive. Some articles: - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new-york-second-avenue-subway-phase-2 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne... - https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/05/07/why-is-second-avenue-subway-phase-2-so-expensive/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/05/07/why-is-second-... And this article is not specifically on the problem of cost, but how replacing signals in the NYC subway has lessons like managing a massive software project: - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-dont-we-know-where-all-the-trains-are/415152/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-d...

jimmaswell 6y ago
> confluence of aging infrastructure, cost of displacing entrenched residents / businesses to make improvements, labor cost, insurance, etc. What about corruption e.g. ghost employees, inflated billing rates, intentional delays, knowingly letting things be done wrong according to a mistaken spec to bill more hours later, all done by a company owned by the mayor's cousin? Construction is famous for those kinds of things.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Lots of city infrastructure changes are under the assumption that the city may keep growing. So revenues keep growing, and the money borrowed today may seem small tomorrow. Its a ponzi scheme. But with population growth pretty much constant for a century, this has worked in lots of towns. Now with the new norm being replacement (families have 2 or fewer children), the assumption is going to be challenged. The infrastructure-debt bubble may burst.

asdff 6y ago
All but the eastern U.S. is growing in population.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Yeah but the growth rate is half or a third what it once was, and declining.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Even out east, we are seeing rural areas depopulate and nearby metros absorbing that local population. For instance, Columbus is often cited as a fast growing city. However, almost all of that growth is from people already living elsewhere in Ohio and moving into the city for greater economic opportunities. As a net it looks like there isn't growth or even decline, as the population of Ohio has been relatively stagnant since 1960, but it's a shift of where the population is located that is also playing out everywhere. Part of it is also due to a lower need for labor in rural areas as farming and manufacturing become more automated, and cities are increasingly centers of knowledge workers and research, rather than industrial centers. In the context of climate change, it is also better to favor investment in cities which are already well scarred by human activity, and have a lot of infrastructure and capital already in place, than to expand into or increase the existing environmental impacts on our natural and rural areas. In California, we've built to the edge of what is sensible given the fringes of civilization perennially burn to the ground.

CapriciousCptl 6y ago

So much doom and gloom in that article. The town in question is McKinney TX, and I grabbed their annual budget[1]. Property taxes make up 50% of their ex-services (water, sewer, trash, parks/rec, airport, etc) revenues. And, the bonds in question will yield ~1.5% at today's rates. In other words, less than inflation. Meanwhile, McKinney has lowered property tax rates in response to higher appraisals (inflation is a major driver of increased appraisals on balance). So, I take 2 issues with the article. First is the payback period, since property tax revenue only makes up 1/2 of the ex-services income and will increase with inflation. And second, with the idea that every area must cover its own expenses. In general commercial, high-dense and/or rich areas subsidize projects in other neighborhoods. You're going to be able to cherry-pick a project that can't be paid by its beneficiaries in every single city. [1] https://www.mckinneytexas.org/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/2210 https://www.mckinneytexas.org/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/22...

maerF0x0 6y ago

This is an idea about society I've been musing a while. As a society hits prosperity it invests in infrastructure with a limited lifespan (even if decades) and therefore there is a certain depreciation rate of infra happening each year. Eventually the infrastructure will rise such that the depreciation rate will have equilibrium with income. At that point the society cannot take on any new projects without deciding it will abandon something else. A similar thing often happens in software -- Product Managers are given scope to build projects of a certain size, but rarely does the business commit to keeping a certain percentage of engineers on to maintain the project forever. So the project decays and the customers eventually walk away. But the Product person has already moved on to other things so they're no longer accountable for the long term picture.... Just some musings, not really sure how widespread/factual it is or solutions...

nradov 6y ago
Sure that happens to some products but it's not inevitable. The current Microsoft Word code base has been actively maintained and enhanced for over 25 years. Customers aren't walking away yet.
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  definitely agree there are exceptions, and microsoft certainly is exceptional in many ways...
- kthejoker2 6y ago
  Software is more like a Ship of Theseus in a way that roads are not. That is, the cost to "switch out" one version of software for another is effectively zero, so if makes sense to "maintain" the product in perpetuity. For a road and other capital expenditures with heavy dependencies, your "lifecycle" is As few changes as possible; and then, all of it changes.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Customers aren't walking away yet. It would be interesting to see usage figures. Twenty five years ago creating a new Word document would be an almost daily occurrence for me. Now it is a rarity. I have a sense that one day it will just disappear and nobody will notice.

asdff 6y ago

A lot of roads are pure waste and should probably be reverted into simpler gravel roads, or left unmaintained. Take a look at this one in Columbus (1). You have full storm drains, nearly a mile of sidewalk, and generous street lighting, for a road that connects between the highway and the city inpound lot which closes before dark. I'm willing to bet not a single person has laid foot on that sidewalk ever, given that the neighborhood around this road is simply the impound lot and a concrete factory, connected to the outside world by a single highway connection; you couldn't walk there if you tried without hopping a fence and tresspassing somewhere. 1. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9093916,-82.9996459,3a,75y,188.68h,85.67t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1so4RiX7yjurMh9gDPKrwobQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Do4RiX7yjurMh9gDPKrwobQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D153.82936%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9093916,-82.9996459,3a,75y,1...

xxpor 6y ago
Meanwhile most streets in Seattle north of N 85th St still don't have sidewalks at all. The estimated cost to add them is in the billions of dollars.
- mikestew 6y ago
  Different agency, but meanwhile King County is spending money to pave a "rails-to-trails" path near Redmond (along Willows Rd. for you locals) that I run on regularly. Until the virus thing, I have never seen another human being use the quite usable gravel trail that's there now. Probably because it's out-of-the-way, no place to park, and it parallels a major paved trail that is less than a mile away. But I'm sure someone's brother-in-law needs a paving contract.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  I live here, and while yeah I would sorta kinda have preferred the sidewalks from the start, I have no interest in ripping up peoples' front yards to retrofit them in. What Seattle is doing now (making a lot of streets limited-access) is way better for pedestrians than a slow, expensive, abortive sidewalk-building-and-street-reconstructing campaign.

xchaotic 6y ago

Looking at the rest of the economy, public infrastructure projects like this are the only hope to keep the economy running. Yeah there will be some paper debt on municipal books but the net benefit of the money unlocked from this is much higher. At least from an economic sense. In a perverse way the more these projects costs, the more money is redistributed.

PostOnce 6y ago
If a large percent of the money just goes to the few owners of the construction company and not to an army of workers, then it was all for naught, so that has to be factored in too.
jkingsbery 6y ago
The Strong Towns book goes into this in more detail. What you say might be the case sometimes, and when it is the case, the money unlocked is reflected in higher property taxes, so the municipal balance sheet stays even. If the town can't somehow get higher property taxes for its improvements, then it spent more money than it will make on the project. If you do that enough time, municipalities start going bankrupt. If people aren't willing to pay higher property taxes for the improvement, then it isn't really helping them.

alex_young 6y ago

Expenditures for McKinney TX [0] show streets as the third lowest cost department, accounting for under 5% of the city budget. The largest expense, like most other cities, is the police department, at nearly 25%. While smart spending is important, it's hard to see street paving as something which threatens to bankrupt this municipality. [0] https://mckinneytexas.opengov.com/transparency#/1687/accountType=expenses&embed=n&breakdown=ac4a3220-88f1-4bc2-a02c-6871819fe8e7&currentYearAmount=cumulative&currentYearPeriod=years&graph=percentage&legendSort=desc&month=5&proration=true&saved_view=5683&selection=34D386D3BDD5D267554C6CB2146EE3BF&projections=null&projectionType=null&highlighting=null&highlightingVariance=null&year=2020&selectedDataSetIndex=null&fiscal_start=2015&fiscal_end=latest https://mckinneytexas.opengov.com/transparency#/1687/account...

jdhn 6y ago
If there's one thing this "defund the police" movement has shown me, it's how much money is spent on police departments. I would have never guessed that the police department in McKinney would be upwards of 25% of the city budget.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  I have read that in a lot of municipalities in a few decades police and firefighters will use up 100% (and more) of the budget once they have to pay out pensions. A lot of them go into retirement at around 50 and will probably live for another 30-40 years more.
- forrestthewoods 6y ago
  > If there's one thing this "defund the police" movement has shown me, it's how much money is spent on police departments. You have been misled. The US does not spend a crazy or obscene amount of money on the police. Government spending is a combination of local + county + state + federal. Local governments are not the primary source of funding for health or education. That’s not a bad thing. The fact that city budgets are dominated by police (and fire) has everything to do with tiers of government responsibility and nothing to do with “how much money is spent on police”. https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KnMdz38JG76qNjLfF3mv3YrIJM0=/0x0:1500x1062/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1500x1062):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20038723/Screen_Shot_2020_06_16_at_11.27.07_PM.png https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KnMdz38JG76qNjLfF3mv3YrIJM0=...

m0zg 6y ago

That's why giving the government even more money never works: it's not theirs, so a third of a mile of a road nobody uses costs $1.5M, and it will get built anyway. Because why the fuck not. An illustrative example was when after the recession the federal government allocated a shitload of federal funds for infrastructure. A busy local road which _did not need repair_ ended up getting torn down and re-paved several times to use the funds over the course of a couple of years. Why? Nobody asked the question why or did the math. There were roads immediately adjacent which did need repair, those still have potholes. Where I live it costs about $1M to install traffic lights on a simple intersection. A local hospital (which I don't even use because it's out of network with my insurance) is raising hundreds of millions of dollars for "renovations" through levies (which are, thankfully, voted down repeatedly). If I were to vote in favor, they'd still charge me hundreds of thousands of dollars if I get cancer and end up getting treated there. Same with "cancer awareness" campaigns. Dude, you're charging an arm, a leg, and a first-born already, why do you need even more money for "awareness"?

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

I get the StrongTowns argument in the US, and on my travels there it's fairly easy to see the blight rolling over. but in the UK i find it harder to spot and wondered if anyone has pointers?

toomanybeersies 6y ago

As an Australian, every time I see roads like this in the USA, they look positively third world. Potholes all over, lacking (or practically lacking) a footpath, drainage, or space for on-street parking. Pine St looks like something I'd expect to find in a developing nation in South America or Asia, not a developed industrial nation like the USA.

nerdponx 6y ago
a footpath This is the biggest oversight of all. It's painful to see new development with no sidewalks.
astine 6y ago
It doesn't take a lot of work find photographs of roads like that in Australia. This isn't a main road, it's a tiny neighborhood road. It doesn't need a lot of infrastructure and I kind of wish that more roads looked like this because they're usually a lot more pleasant than the big ones. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/CSIRO_ScienceImage_3723_Aerial_view_of_the_rural_community_of_Burrawang_in_the_Wingecarribee_Catchment_south_of_Sydney_NSW_1999.jpg/1200px-CSIRO_ScienceImage_3723_Aerial_view_of_the_rural_community_of_Burrawang_in_the_Wingecarribee_Catchment_south_of_Sydney_NSW_1999.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/CS...
austhrow743 6y ago
As an Australian, what sort of life have you lived where you don't think we have roads like Pine St? Have you ever left a CBD?
- toomanybeersies 6y ago
  Sure, I've seen roads like this in tiny regional towns with half a dozen houses and a single pub, but Pine St is in McKinney, TX, roughly the same size as Bendigo or Ballarat, which don't have roads like this in residential areas.
  - astine 6y ago

Nasrudith 6y ago

I wonder how well road projects scale in terms of length - if it would be better or worse per mile to have to do 50 or 500 miles of contiguous road vs 0.32 miles. The absolute cost would be far higher of course but if it it scales slower than linear it suggests a consolidation process as more efficient or whatever the "peak efficency segment" may be.

coding123 6y ago

One simple reason these budgets get approved: Kick backs.

brudgers 6y ago

I walk both of these streets every single day with my dog and have not had any issues on either. This is the urban planning version of "works on my machine." Per the article, the project includes ADA compliant sidewalks. However, if I take off my property owner hat and put on my taxpayer hat things start to look a lot different. There's also a citizen hat. It doesn't focus on "what's in it for me." Citizens are what makes towns strong, not property owners. Not taxpayers.

neilparikh 6y ago
When you have finite resources, you need to make tradeoffs. We probably don't have money to make every single sidewalk in the US ADA compliant, and there are also other things the city needs to fund. Given that, it's better to focus on streets where ADA compliance would be the most useful, and that's probably not in a street like this. Here, pedestrians, cars and wheelchair users can probably just share the road given that it's not a through street. The 1.5M can then go towards funding other initiatives that would help more people.

_curious_ 6y ago

StrongTowns is an org to keep an eye on

DominikD 6y ago

I can easily walk my dog there so there's no need for the sidewalk. If you break your leg, if you're old or disabled - tough luck. I stopped reading after this ableist argument. Those overreaching regulations trying to make life easy for disabled - how are we going to pay for those? Locally we had a similar response to the idea of replacing pedestrian overpass bridges with regular crossings. Cost of maintaining the bridge and its accessibility are less important than those poor cars which may now have to stop on a red light.

sAbakumoff 6y ago

4 feet sidewalk is a joke. It is not enough to keep the social distance.

loco5niner 6y ago

> Better with some vehicles parked on the street. Most everyone would drive at a safe speed here. [author shows picture of a street so crowded with parked cars, even a single car cannot safely drive through without swerving] The author has bad taste

_bxg1 6y ago

Municipal law, spending, etc. seems to me like a ripe avenue for software being used to improve society. Here's why: most people don't even know what things are happening in their area, much less do the math to see the full picture. There's an enormous gap between what information is technically available to the public and how that information is put on people's radar so it can influence voting and activism. I feel like I've also read that, for this exact reason, municipal governments are some of the most corrupt parts of our system.