I've seen the infrastructure thing come up for awhile now, and it's definitely true. In my area, as in others I've read of, they're smashing paved roads into gravel roads as the paved are too expensive.
The thing that fascinates me is that it feels like a forgone conclusion that infrastructure costs cannot be made cheaper. Have we really hit the most cost effective, cheapest, most sustainable method of laying/replacing sewer/gas/water lines and roads?
There's no innovation left at all when it comes to making pipes that are more easily replaceable without digging the entire road up? There's no brilliant ideas left at all on how to 'pave' roads so they're smooth enough in a way that costs less money, or lasts way longer? Heck, while we're talking improvements maybe we should have a way to pave a road such that we don't have such massive runoff and its more resilient to minor settling underneath without opening large potholes.
I do wonder whether the shit really hitting the fan, and massive chunks of the population having their roads smashed back to gravel might shake a few new ideas out.
We have an infrastructure system that maximizes spending to political donor companies. Naturally under those conditions its laugh out loud obvious that its going to cost more to build roads than to build an entire city of houses. If the houses were built under the same level of government corruption as the roads, they'd cost 10x as much minimum and only last 5 years before needing teardown replacement, and then the ratio of replacement cost of structure to infrastructure would look more natural or believable.
The puzzle they have is trying to fix a corrupt system. Merely replacing "evil car streets" with "progressive bicycle paths" will not fix anything, they'll just be a followup article about how horrible it is that the replacement cost of the bicycle path infrastructure curiously remains the same $32B because that's what the politically active re-election campaign donor contractors require.
Another article by this author (http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republica...) describes a rejected federal proposal to hand over most federal infrastructure dollars to states, the implication being local governments would know how to allocate dollars more effectively than the federal government. The author suggests going a step further and letting majors direct the funding.
As the article says, there are plenty of solutions for these problems, individually.
The predicament, as a whole, is that we cannot afford them.
Infrastructure quality is, like so many things, directly proportionate to investment. You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa, but you can't magically reduce both at the same time while providing the same level of service.
The problem is that the level of economic productivity supported by (for example) a strip mall is so low that it cannot support the ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure that is required to allow it to exist. This is also true for many suburban homes and office buildings.
You must either extract more productive value from the same land area and population, reduce service quality, or invest massive quantities of capital in maintenance cost reduction, which has virtually the same effect as either of the previous.
I think schools is as big (or bigger) of a problem than the infrastructure. So many towns are bedroom communities that have people commuting to other more dense areas. All the businesses that make money (and pay lots of taxes) are in those other dense areas, not local. Now the local community is on the hook forever to support the school base. Very few communities have rules saying that new developments must pay a substantial fee that could be saved against future school, infrastructure costs. But like most things in this country, people want it just don't want to pay for it (and if it is bad, don't want it here).
So the land could be used better. That's my takeaway from the article, too. If the zone can't afford the infrastructure then it should be repurposed/zoned. Bonus points if it makes cities more walkable/less designed by car.
>You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa
Umm is that really true ? Maybe it is I just don't see why this would be - if anything I would guess spending more would lead to more expensive maintenance as well
> but you can't magically reduce both at the same time while providing the same level of service.
The classic example here is using concrete or asphalt for roads. Building a four-lane highway in concrete costs something like a million dollars per mile, all told. Building a four-lane highway with asphalt costs something like half as much. But the problem is that the asphalt highway will wear out much more quickly and will require you to go in every year and patch potholes, whereas the concrete highway will be much less susceptible to potholes and won't need to be torn up and repaved every 5-7 years. So by spending the extra money to build in concrete today, you're saving yourself extra expenses later on.
Of course, asphalt is cheaper and easier to put down, so there is always the temptation to go ahead and build the asphalt road now and take credit for it in front of voters while leaving the problem of maintaining those roads for the next person in office.
I get the concept in theory I'm just not sure it's a given in practice - the way I've seen people spend extra money on projects isn't really for long term cost reduction but features that make it look flashy (increasing the scope and making it more expensive to maintain).
Take, for example, road surfacing. You can use gravel, which requires multiple maintenance visits per year to remain functional and definitely has knock-on costs in terms of car damage and such.
Or you can upgrade to asphalt - lasts much longer, much lower maintenance in terms of required manpower and visits to remain functional, etc.
Or, if you want to go the whole way, you can use reinforced concrete or a slab paver setup, they will last ~30-50 years depending largely on traffic (asphalt tends to degrade even with little traffic).
That's what I mean. It's about a 3x initial cost difference between each of the tiers, but your long term maintenance costs go down the more you spend. It's not a strict one-to-one, but still.
>>You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa
> Umm is that really true ?
Maybe not universally, but often, yes. E.g., you can build using more expensive materials that will last longer/are more resistant to environmental decay.
And when concrete roads fall into disrepair, they get to be really nasty to drive on. I feel like I'm going to shake my car apart driving on some roads in Iowa.
I can't say that asphalt roads in disrepair are much better, but potholes tend to be more quickly fixed than slightly mis-aligned sections of concrete roads.
Lowering maintenance costs is one of the things you can spend money on when building infrastructure, but not the only thing, so it depends on how you spend the money.
> Not magic - innovation.
Innovation is great, but in most cases requires new upfront expenses that have already been covered for existing solutions. We already have a fairly good amount of infrastructure for producing infrastructure, so usually innovation is one of the ways you can spend more upfront to reduce long term maintenance.
> I've seen the infrastructure thing come up for awhile now, and it's definitely true.
Sort of. I'm not convinced their infrastructure pricing is accurate at all. I fully believe infrastructure has a higher cost in the suburbs, and that we aren't fully saving for/planning for those costs. But the numbers this article uses are insanely too high, to the point that it feels like an outright lie.
Strongtowns claims it costs more money to maintain the infrastructure for a single-family home (on average), than the average house would cost to build from scratch using retail pricing today (including land + construction of the house, and all of the related road/water/power/sewer infrastructure).
The StrongTown estimate seems to claim it's replacing infrastructure "once a generation" (30 years?), but is charging enough money to rip-and-replace every piece of all infrastructure 6 times per generation. Which is really high -- no one does that, there wouldn't usually be any need to do so.
Or to put it another way, StrongTowns is claiming that infrastructure maintenance alone costs the same as leveling the entire neighborhood and rebuilding it all from scratch at retail pricing every 30 years. Which is just outlandish -- if infrastructure actually was that expensive, 90% of these suburban houses never could have been built in the first place, even if financed using subsidy or debt.
> StrongTowns is claiming that infrastructure maintenance alone costs the same as leveling the entire neighborhood and rebuilding it all from scratch at retail pricing every 30 years.
This doesn't seem that surprising to me. Replacing existing utilities in place is far more expensive than laying them in the first place because you have to do it without cutting off everyone's access to water/electricity/whatever while you do it. Plus you have to work around other infrastructure and houses and dig up roads etc. And it's difficult to coordinate utility replacements so you do this stuff once for gas and later for water and again for the sewer.
On top of all that, infrastructure is just terribly expensive. Price out laying a driveway. Now imagine scaling it up by maybe 10x just for the section of road in front of your house.
> Replacing existing utilities in place is far more expensive than laying them in the first place.
Sure, but it's not 6X more expensive in the suburbs. Water / Gas lines, for instance, are often under sidewalks or yards now so you don't have to dig up the road to replace them.
> because you have to do it without cutting off everyone's access to water/electricity/whatever while you do it
You don't have to. When utility work gets done in the suburbs, people often just lose water / electricity / gas / whatever for the 24-48 hours while they do it, and just have to deal with it.
(We're talking about sprawl -- stuff done cheap, by definition. This is not the complex operation that replacing water lines in Manhattan would be).
> On top of all that, infrastructure is just terribly expensive. Price out laying a driveway.
Even after adjusting for inflation, it's only about 2X the cost of a driveway, not 10x.
And that's my problem with the article. It seems they took the actual cost of infrastructure, "imagined scaling it up maybe 10x", and then claimed a crisis using their imaginary costs. Real infrastructure costs, while high, are simply not anywhere near as high as they are claiming.
> Sure, but it's not 6X more expensive in the suburbs. Water / Gas lines, for instance, are often under sidewalks or yards now so you don't have to dig up the road to replace them.
Sometimes. Digging up sidewalks and yards is also expensive, regardless.
> You don't have to. When utility work gets done in the suburbs, people often just lose water / electricity / gas / whatever for the 24-48 hours while they do it, and just have to deal with it.
I've never been anywhere that 48 hours without electricity or water was considered acceptable for maintenance. In my experience, most maintenance is done during business hours with the expectation that people have utilities when they get ready in the morning and when they get home.
24 hours without a major utility is generally considered an emergency and crews are driving in from other states to help.
> Even after adjusting for inflation, it's only about 2X the cost of a driveway, not 10x.
You're probably right that the 10x number isn't accurate, since I completely made it up. It's still a lot of money and the cost to replace is always higher than the cost to build in the first place (with perhaps the exception of cost for grading).
> And that's my problem with the article. It seems they took the actual cost of infrastructure, "imagined scaling it up maybe 10x", and then claimed a crisis using their imaginary costs. Real infrastructure costs, while high, are simply not anywhere near as high as they are claiming.
I feel like you're nitpicking their claims without providing any alternative data or a compelling reason why their numbers don't make sense. You're asserting that they arbitrarily scaled up costs but you've not shown that they did so. The author is a civil engineer and a PE and a city planner so there's some weight behind his claims. You're asserting that his numbers are lies because you don't like them.
I'm not sure where your "6 times per generation" replacement claim is coming from, either.
Who is going to do that innovation? A startup? Good luck getting a municipal government to take risks by handing maintenance contracts to a startup. Their incentives are to do nothing and wait to be bailed out through inflation.
+1 If you're having a hard time finding innovators in some area that has obvious utility and isn't already mathematically proven to be near-optimal, the next logical question is, "what's preventing this type of work from being monetized/incentivized?"
The thing that fascinates me is that it feels like a forgone conclusion that infrastructure costs cannot be made cheaper. Have we really hit the most cost effective, cheapest, most sustainable method of laying/replacing sewer/gas/water lines and roads?
There's no innovation left at all when it comes to making pipes that are more easily replaceable without digging the entire road up? There's no brilliant ideas left at all on how to 'pave' roads so they're smooth enough in a way that costs less money, or lasts way longer? Heck, while we're talking improvements maybe we should have a way to pave a road such that we don't have such massive runoff and its more resilient to minor settling underneath without opening large potholes.
I do wonder whether the shit really hitting the fan, and massive chunks of the population having their roads smashed back to gravel might shake a few new ideas out.