3 ms·

Today I learned that roads are mind bogglingly expensive to build and maintain. But without any clues to the reasons why. Labor? Materials? Something seems off

• throwaway346434 5y ago
  Labor here also includes: - planning - safety - certification For example; you are paying for a crew of 10 people to do a minor repair - people to manage traffic, people to do the planning and legal legalwork to shut down the road, people to assess the appropriate fix, people to do the actual implementation, potentially different people to redo any line marking; the running costs of the equipment, transporting it to and fro; etc etc. A simple pothole patch might take a lot less; but is only temporary and you end up doing a bunch of them. Resurface a stretch of road or a kerb? Whole different set of people and tools. Arguably we can make this cheaper, safer through automation in the long run, but simply having less to maintain is also a simple valid solution. Worse, because its driven by weather events, you tend to get all of you bigger issues at once - ie, here, high rainfall took out roads in the hills; due to instability. To fix it became a much, much bigger engineering process than normal maintenance; and it happened to three critical roads in a short time frame; so various authorities had to scale up quickly; and presumably paid for that.