Sublime

If the city spends $1 million repairing a street, it’s not sufficient for the tax base served by that street to only produce $1 million of revenue over the life of that street. If that’s all that results, then why bother? The public doesn’t build infrastructure just to have infrastructure.

Any rationally minded person understands that the street in front of your home is not an asset for the community. It can’t be picked up and sold to the neighboring town. It can’t be pledged as collateral against a debt. The street is a liability, plain and simple. In the infinite game of running a city, it represents an eternal commitment to

our core transportation funding problem is that we’ve built more transportation infrastructure than we can effectively utilize. Our solution, bizarrely, is to build more.