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by somenameforme 12 days ago
I don't see how this would work because you're saying that the older sidewalks are scrapped and rebuilt when they hit a state of 'x' deterioration, so you only see > 'x' state ones. But how then could it be that newer sidewalks are allowed to fall below 'x' instead of also just being scrapped and rebuilt?
2 comments
altairprime 12 days ago
Municipal budgets cratered hard over the past couple decades, roadway maintenance is given precedence over sidewalk maintenance, and SUVs and electric vehicles do considerably more roadway damage per vehicle. So there’s concurrent causes promoting a global decay in sidewalk maintenance in cities that expanded without the necessary tax base to support maintenance: see for example Los Angeles (current-day example!) repaving all but one foot’s width of their roadways so that they don’t have to fix broken sidewalks. This doesn’t contradict the survivor bias point! If anything, it’ll accelerate it: you’re about to see just how many (or few) sidewalk squares survive the underspend. Citizen science, here we come!
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Cthulhu_ 12 days ago
Politics, money allocation, taxation, etc. The US had a golden age last century and is now in decline. It can still bounce back but it needs a political and legal revolution, in this particular case, it needs to tax the wealthy and spend it on municipal improvements.

But that's socialism / liberalism and apparently that's terrorism now.

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somenameforme 12 days ago
This is a bit of a tangent, but government revenue has skyrocketed in recent decades. Here is an inflation adjusted table. [1] As a percent of GDP it's been fairly stable since the end of WW2 [2], and dramatically higher than prior. But that understates reality because it excludes deficit spending which has increased exponentially since then. So the government is collecting and spending substantially more than back in the golden age, even after accounting for population/economic/etc growth.

[1] - https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-federal-go...

[2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

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andsoitis 11 days ago
> it needs to tax the wealthy

The top 1% of earners pay about 38% of all federal individual income taxes, while making up roughly 20% of the nation's total Adjusted Gross Income.

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