One of my thoughts is building infrastructure is a speculative bet. You hope that it generates enough economic benefit to pay for it's construction, maintenance

One of my thoughts is building infrastructure is a speculative bet. You hope that it generates enough economic benefit to pay for it's construction, maintenance, and eventual replacement. A thought is sometimes that bet fails. You end up with infrastructure that doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for it's maintenance or eventual replacement. I feel like post war the US made a lot of extravagant speculative bets on infrastructure, particularly related to suburban housing development.