5 ms·
I find it hard to believe that building a road is so expensive. Some random website I found claims the cost of a two-lane undivided road costs $3 million per mi
by halpert 5y ago
I find it hard to believe that building a road is so expensive. Some random website I found claims the cost of a two-lane undivided road costs $3 million per mile in an urban setting. Looking at the satellite imagery of Mississauga linked elsewhere, the frontage of each house is around 50 ft. So there are about 211 houses per mile. That comes out to $14,000 per house to build the road. The approximate lifespan of an asphalt road is 18 years, leading to a per year cost of ~800 dollars. Of course, this doesn't include maintenance of the road (fixing pot holes, plowing, etc.), but $800 per year seems like a pretty manageable sum of money.
- titanomachy 5y agoIn Galesburg (the town in the article), it wasn’t a manageable amount. That town has extremely low property values compared to any towns I’m familiar with, though. The author’s single-family home is worth about $60k. The median home in Mississauga is $900k (CAD), so I assume they can afford to maintain their roads. We’re talking about pretty different things, though. Suburbs of ultra high-cost-of-living cities have their taxes buoyed up their proximity to the big economic engines, while small towns like Galesburg have to figure out how to be self-sufficient without that constant influx of wealth.
- halpert 5y agoBut would more density really solve the problem? An inability to produce $800 per household will make anything hard.
- closeparen 5y agoThe property tax bill in TFA is $1700, but roads are only one of the things property taxes buy.
- titanomachy 5y agoI was thinking this as well. I wonder how much this is just a consequence of per capita city productivity being so many times greater than small towns.
- notfromhere 5y agoMore density means more people per road and less road in general. Done right, and households are not the only entities paying into the coffers
- tptacek 5y agoThe median home price in Galesburg is $90k. Makes sense for a declining city in far-out rural Illinois.
- titanomachy 5y agoIt’s an interesting question to me what these towns will do going forward. If participation in the global economy is required to maintain a first-world standard of living, what will these towns produce that the rest of the world wants? Some will farm or extract natural resources, but these operations require fewer people than they used to, so fewer towns. Some will be holiday destinations for city-dwellers. But we will probably sustain far fewer of these towns than we have historically.