| > And after that; Silence. It's like you didn't even care to maintain it. I'm not sure the overall comparison here holds, but this is overwhelmingly true. America has made a huge amount of funding available for new infrastructure, while constantly underbudgeting (and underspending) on maintenance. The result is a steadily growing liability that would render most suburbs and many cities insolvent if depreciation were honestly accounted for. [1] The founder of Strong Towns was in fact a civil engineer who started the group in a fit of remorse over doing exactly that. [2] Hired to repair a suburban drainage system, he realized that the maintenance was too expensive for the town to pay, and federal grants were unavailable for small-scale maintenance. So instead he found a massive grant (9x the maintenance cost) to expand and modernize the system. It covered costs, but set up a needlessly large system with vastly more costs to cover down the road. This is basically how all urban and transit infrastructure gets done here. Partly for cultural reasons, but largely for financial ones: you can't get emergency funding for new construction, but if you spend maintenance money on upgrades and expansions, then you can go begging for emergency repair funds on what you've built. [3] [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... [2] http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-sprawl/ [3] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/4/this-is-why-inf... |