21–30 of 324 posts
Major urbanized is incredibly expensive. Tens of millions... I read somewhere that China spends $30 million per mile of high-speed rail. 22,000 miles and counting. The US is going to bankrupt itself trying to modernize its aging infrastructure.
I'm always amused here in Australia when governments like to make the spending on roads and the amount raised through petrol taxes and registration fees "balance out". Uhhh, ok, you're sitting on billions of dollars worth of capital and you're patting yourselves on the back that it's "breaking even".
This does not address a larger question: how much does a mile of road cost to keep ? This is the installed base question. Consider the amount of road that has been built out in the US relative to the populations that road is serving. Maintenance and expansion is paid out mainly from state and local taxes. That's an enormous civilizational overhead the US contends with, not to mention the economic cost of a large port…
This reminds me of a blog post about the unsustainability of suburbs — https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2017/03/20/the-fiscal-unsust... Even if this $1.5m figure is wildly inflated, calculate how few people live on a given mile in the suburbs, a conservative estimate on how much it costs to maintain a road, and the numbers just don't add up. The suburbs were a ponzi scheme and the bottom is about to fall out.
Come on, some remote villages in the third world have paved roads to them.
Major urbanized is incredibly expensive. Tens of millions... I read somewhere that China spends $30 million per mile of high-speed rail. 22,000 miles and counting. The US is going to bankrupt itself trying to modernize its aging infrastructure.
One would hope so, but it seems our VMT is going up over time whilst people are locking in very expensive, long-term car purchases.
This does not address a larger question: how much does a mile of road cost to keep ? This is the installed base question. Consider the amount of road that has been built out in the US relative to the populations that road is serving. Maintenance and expansion is paid out mainly from state and local taxes. That's an enormous civilizational overhead the US contends with, not to mention the economic cost of a large port…
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=Disaster+and+d...
I feel like I am missing something here, a mile of road in a rural area costs $1,500,000 to reconstruct? How do small towns afford to maintain their roads?? Perhaps there are many costs that don't inflate as the number of miles increases, like the equipment needed to break down and repave the roads?
As to how small towns afford it--you don't repave that often, and you focus efforts on what to repave. For example, Cedar Rapids, Iowa calculated it would cost $500 million over 10 years to repave everything that needs to be repaved: https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Annual-road-repaving-to-st....
Cedar Rapids has about 53,000 households, so that's about $943 per household per year. To put that into perspective, we can do a calculation. 18% of DC metro area commuters use Metrorail. If you take 18% of the 2.2 million DC metro households, that's about 400,000 households (roughly) using Metrorail. The rail capital budget is about $1 billion annually, so about $2,500 per household per year. Excluding the cost of new rail cars, its about $1,500 per household.
(Obviously this is a very back-of-the-napkin calculation, but it puts things into perspective.)
[1] https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/budget/upload/FY19-Propose... (p. 76)
I'm planning to live a car free life soon. I'll be moving in to the city so almost everything is within walking distance and just about everything is accessable via public transport. The only thing I haven't been able work out is how I will continue to go mtn biking since bikes aren't allowed on the bus. But I just can't justify the massive expense of owning a car and a car park for one activity.
I'm planning to live a car free life soon. I'll be moving in to the city so almost everything is within walking distance and just about everything is accessable via public transport. The only thing I haven't been able work out is how I will continue to go mtn biking since bikes aren't allowed on the bus. But I just can't justify the massive expense of owning a car and a car park for one activity.