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Comment by DataGata | Hacker News Reader

The Strong Towns line is a pretty simple one, and this article simply reiterates on it: Nobody does ROI calculations on infrastructure costs and it will catch up with you sooner or later.

It might be compared to technical debt for the HN crowd: you build fast and break things for a couple of decades (post-WW2) and then suddenly you find yourself with an unimaginably complex, catatonic system that can't pay for itself. The interest payments overwhelm the rest of the system.

However! That doesn't actually answer the question about why _new_ infrastructure costs so much (surely a new subway line doesn't actually care if half the roads are ten years behind their maintenance schedule).

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> Nobody does ROI calculations on infrastructure costs

Strongtowns have a great article about costs and benefits https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2010/12/21/best-of-blog-... which makes some fantastic points about bogus numbers, and about how spending $ without gaining $ is a failure mode.

However, sometimes I feel they sideline the point that our government taxes us to provide shared infrastructure (legal, social, transport, hospitals, education, etc) and to prevent the tragedy of the commons.

Money spent to encourage social goals can be worthwhile or not, independent of the financial balance. Spending money that saves everyone time can be worthwhile, even if the tax base is not increased proportionally (the linked article disagrees with this). Edit: if the government taxes me $x for an hour's work, and spends $x to save me more than an hours drive, that is good economics for everyone even though the government hasn't increased tax returns.

Anyone who has been to some poor countries can viscerally understand the value of roading infrastructure, the value of social trust "infrastructure", or the value of safety and health improvements.

We can all see waste and bogus numbers in our governments, but yet most of us wouldn't move to a more anarchic country. We should fight against government waste and misincentives, but we should encourage improvements to our common good (the opposite of a tragedy).

Just FWIW, the Strong Towns team would mostly agree with what you're saying.[1]

Chuck would liken spending public money on things that don't have a measurable return on investment to "ice cream." There's room for ice cream in life. The problem is when its your entire diet.

What we're more worried about is that cities are losing so much money on bad investments that they're increasingly unable to afford "bread and butter," let alone ice cream.

And to be clear, as a response to this problem Strong Towns doesn't advocate stopping all spending/investment, but rather to take a careful approach that seeks to invest in things that produce a return, so the city will have more resources over time, so that there's money to pay for ice cream :)

I understand why you might get your impression though. Strong Towns content mostly is a blog stream and you can read a lot of it without getting the entire picture. Chuck's book is coming out pretty soon [2], and I think that'll help. The book boils down the entire Strong Towns "philosophy" (if you will) into something you can read in a day.

[1] Source: I'm on the board.

[2] https://www.strongtowns.org/strongamerica

this may just be a part of your analogy, but it doesn't seem like being revenue neutral is a great goal for public infrastructure.

that's not to say one should not evaluate the potential of a dollar spent in a metro area of 25million vs. 2500. but it is to say that that metric of revenue neutrality isn't ideal.

one could easily imagine a situation where $1 in infra leads to $4 in economic growth, or $1.05 in additional tax revenue, or whatever.

but yeah i agree, those are the calculations that need to be done. and yeah it's a bit self reinforcing - rich get richer, economy wise - but this notion that everyone can not pay that much extra yet get their own big ass plot of land, roads and parking spaces - which is what suburbs are, as far as i can tell - isn't sustainable.

Infrastructure should not be weighed on whether or not it is profitable. You don't buy a stapler and think about whether you will return on your $7 investment, you buy it because it's the tool you need.

NYC only has a big subway because it gobbled up all the failed private railroads, still unprofitable today but it's the only way to move the workforce into midtown Manhattan every day.

LA at one point had one of the most extensive rail transit systems in the world (1), but it was ran by a private company that couldn't make any money off infrastructure, cut service, and circled the drain until its doom. The city opted instead to switch to busses, build elevated highways, and tear out rails instead of purchasing and improving existing rail transit. Today, the city is spending millions per mile to build rail over some of those same former railbeds that were dismantled 60 years ago, because rail is the right tool for the job of moving people around a city.

1. https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2013-01-30-1925.jpg

> You don't buy a stapler and think about whether you will return on your $7 investment, you buy it because it's the tool you need.

You would if that stapler costs $10k, or if you need a new one every other day.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Technical debt accrued at a large engineering organization is very similar to bloated infrastructure costs in the US. That also doesn't explain the _why_.

My very rough take is that physical (and virtual) infrastructure require more labor specialization as the complexity of the existing system increases. In order to get that subway built you need specialists come in to make sure the roads can withstand extra stress from tunneling etc etc. Those specialists are expensive and miss-communicate with other specialists etc etc.

It sounds more like snowballing costs as you deal with technical debt by throwing more Heroku at it.

It has seemed apparent to me for some time that contractors/developers are pumping costs and milking change orders, with cities going along with it, possibly due to limited numbers of contenders. Similar to healthcare costs being a dance of growth between insurance and medical providers.

what these articles lack is the list of costs in a project. there should be law requiring all projects to list all costs in an easily accessible document.

we already require this in the medical field and know full well that those 15 dollar bandaid and insurance premiums are the things that drives ip costs.

It looks like there is some infrastructure ROI studies dating back to at least the 1980s

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/060320a/forum.cfm

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