[nickff]

That makes sense if you only look at the municipal level, but it seems like citizens are not getting much per their 'transportation buck'; i.e. they pay a lot of money to multiple levels of government, and those governments are not able to deliver much value per dollar.

[lumost]

A useful term is “endemic corruption”. We like to think of corruption as illegal activity like kickbacks, and bribes. However there is also corruption where everyone pads the estimates a bit, everyone makes things a bit harder than they should be, and tons of “make work” to keep all the jobs created for forgotten purposes busy.

Real reform will be hard.