Taxation and the middle class

[danbrotherston]

If they want to save money on road maintenance, they should do it at construction time: build it at 2 lanes instead of 4, or just don’t build it. Be honest about how much stuff costs. What if we had a policy that we don’t build any new roads or road widenings when there is more than a 5 year backlog on infrastructure renewal?

Edit: I just realized what this would turn into: road widenings would be essential, but no bicycle infrastructure construction would happen while we were backlogged, which would be all of the time.

It needs to be smart. IRA Needles Blvd is a good example. It was built as two lanes, then shortly after that, rebuilt as 4 lanes. It would have been cheaper to do 4 lanes in the first place.

Stirling, form Mill to Charles, was 4 lanes, and it should have been 2. Then we spend money reducing it to 2.

Other things, there needs to be better communication between departments. How many times have we seen a road dug up to replace something (none emergency) only to see the road ripped up again as it was part of a program. Could the none emergency work not have been put on hold for 2 months? Same when they rebuild a road, only to rip it up to replace something that was due for replacement.

Literally millions being tossed away by mismanagement. While they have gotten better over the past few years, it still happens.

"It needs to be smart"...Ira Needles was "smart" in that it was designed to be widened (the widening work was cheap and easy, just a little earlier than expected). The problem with Ira Needles is they approved the boardwalk which induced vast sums of traffic, and that was not in the traffic models. But even if the road would not have been widened, it would still have been wasteful, because it was already essentially built as a 4 lane road.

But fundamentally there was zero evaluation of the actual cost of leaving it as a two lane road vs. widening it. Yes, there were some traffic delays for like 10 minutes a day...but it's likely the long term cost of maintaining a 4 lane road forever significantly outweigh the minor short term congestion in all economic measures. But no such evaluation is ever done.

Of course, the real solution would be to not force tens of thousands of people to drive by creating a landscape that is utterly oppressive to anyone not in a car.

We haven't "reduced" Stirling, we've repurposed the space for better uses, but that involves painting lines, it costs essentially nothing. It makes better use of the money we're spending, but it does not change the fact that paving a 4 lane wide road was and is wasteful.

As for duplicated effort, the city generally does make an effort to do this. Their timelines are quite long and are able to align things together like this, you rarely see cities duplicating non-emergency effort in a short timeframe. Of course, sometimes the region does some work and the city does some work, that's harder to organize, but still possible.

Of course, probably 9 times out of 10 what you are discussing is a private developer doing work, and not only is it silly to think a private developer will align their timelines to a city governent, it doesn't cost us anything--in theory at least--not only is a developer paying for the work, they are also paying for permits to cover the cost of shutting down the road, whether they cover all the costs or not...I mean...they're not...just like nobody covers all the cost of using roads.