As to how small towns afford it--you don't repave that often, and you focus efforts on what to repave. For example, Cedar Rapids, Iowa calculated it would cost $500 million over 10 years to repave everything that needs to be repaved: https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Annual-road-repaving-to-st....
Cedar Rapids has about 53,000 households, so that's about $943 per household per year. To put that into perspective, we can do a calculation. 18% of DC metro area commuters use Metrorail. If you take 18% of the 2.2 million DC metro households, that's about 400,000 households (roughly) using Metrorail. The rail capital budget is about $1 billion annually, so about $2,500 per household per year. Excluding the cost of new rail cars, its about $1,500 per household.
(Obviously this is a very back-of-the-napkin calculation, but it puts things into perspective.)
[1] https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/budget/upload/FY19-Propose... (p. 76)
for more perspective, cedar rapids average income is $54,465 per household, compared to $99,669 for the DC metro area.
My parents retired somewhere nice (read: wealthy) and there was recently a big stink at the town meeting because they wanted to repave a road that doesn't need it to the tune of a mil or so and it was an obvious handout to a well connected paving/construction company.Meanwhile my city (who's name is synonymous with urban blight if you ask my parents neighbors) bought a pavement milling attachment for a skid steer (an item that costs less than a pickup truck) and it made the regional news because they're known for being so tight with money. I could go on but I won't since you get the picture.
You're comparing an all-inclusive capital budget versus simply repaving roads. How much does DC Metro spend on track maintenance annually? How much does Cedar Rapids spend on lighting and signage?
How much do Cedar Rapids residents spend on their cars? The average used car payment runs in excess of $4,800 annually. New cars run around a hundred or so bucks a month more.
The DC metro is a bit of an odd duck since a large chunk of its users don't actually live in DC. The Census Dept. puts metro ridership at about 21% of all commuters commuting into DC, and overall about 34% of all DC residents use public transit (of all modes) as their primary means of transportation.
So even though you're including the cost of things like stations and vehicles, I think the overall cost is much closer (if not slanted in favor of transit) than you're letting on. That said, rail is typically one of the most expensive modes of public transit.
Per the budget the plan is to spend at most $249 million annually (less for most years) on track and structures rehabilitation. That's the closest you'll get to a repaving budget and includes things beyond track maintenance and replacement.
With that in mind the six year plan would call for per-capita spending of between $335 and $620 annually, cheaper than repaving the roads.
In any event, the point isn’t to say that road paving is cheaper, but to address GP’s question, which is how cities can afford it. It’s an order of magnitude comparison to put the number into context. (For one thing, the road maintenance budget for Cedar Rapids is overstated by a factor of two, because I used the projection of what the city thinks it ideally needs to spend rather than what it does spend.)
Sure, because municipalities typically externalize those costs (e.g. police doing traffic duty or parking control). Road signaling itself is simpler than rail signaling but still needs periodic maintenance. You've got stuff like generators (a necessity out here now that PG&E is introducing recreational blackouts. Presumably sensor lights increase the cost of repaving.
Likewise Cedar Rapids almost certainly has to plow the roads for a good chunk of the year where a subway and even a surface rail system typically wouldn't. Of course with plowing comes the cost of more frequent repaving.
In any event, the point isn’t to say that road paving is cheaper, but to address GP’s question, which is how cities can afford it. It’s an order of magnitude comparison to put the number into context.
Sure, because governments typically externalize the cost of roads but not public transit. In San Francisco, SFPD will bill the MTA for any sort of police presence on Muni. They sure as shit don't bill Caltrans for the cost of traffic enforcement.
Sounds a tad more expensive than it needs to be. Skimming search results for my country (.fi), I get numbers ranging from 30 000 to 50 000 eur per kilometer. I know murican roads are wider, but I don't think they're that much wider. And I don't think we're particularly effective or cheap at doing it..
Often, they don't. Examples:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2010/1/11/the-cost-of-de...
https://www.sdnewswatch.org/stories/small-s-d-towns-struggle...
https://www.wpr.org/small-wisconsin-towns-paved-roads-return...
Many places in the US spent and borrowed to build infrastructure without budgeting for long-term maintenance; they also encouraged development patterns (e.g. suburban sprawl) that are cheap to build, but quite expensive when you take into account the long-term maintenance requirements.
This is a problem even in more urban areas, which is why lots of urbanists (including Strong Towns) advocate cutting back on new road construction, and taking into account the local tax base before building out infrastructure.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/1/22/paved-with-goo...
The trick is, communities can usually get outside subsidy (state and federal) for _expansion_ projects. So when the road breaks down and they don't have local money to fix it, one of the strategies is to go to the higher level government for an "economic development" project to get outside money to pay for the road to be widened / expanded. This is true even when the added capacity isn't needed.
Of course, there are a ton of non-local funding that gets drawn from:
- federal and state gas taxes
- state vehicle registration fees (varying by type and weight of vehicle)
- state, county and municipal specific property, income and / or sales taxes
As for highways, there is the federal highway trust, and grants and loans can be taken out to pay for them, but that typically does not fall on the town's shoulders alone (if at all).
Also note there are a _lot_ of grading options available, some as simple as gravel and tar.
Living in a small town, our roads are in poor shape.
Additionally, we have a US highway that cuts through the center of town.
The state administers the maintenance of that particular road, so we have had incidents where the state will hire contractors to modify the sidewalks along the highway, to make them ADA compliant, but not coordinate w the city.
So, the city winds up ripping up the sidewalks, because of an infrastructure upgrade for the water system.
So, short answer, we don’t maintain our roads.
Unless you have a really good tax base, the money just is not there.
However, we could only afford it because we got a grant from the state. Our annual town budget could not afford the road maintenance.
Do you experience freezing temperatures?
What we don't have is frequent heavy vehicles at speed. The state actually bans certain types of commercial vehicles on specific roads in the spring when road beds are soft.
The figures cited in this story seem high. Or maybe they're normal in Illinois or some other state where costs are extraordinary. Their not in line with what I see.
An acre of land which is large for a town is 43,560 square feet or 208’ x 208’ though you can get significantly narrower along a road. A mile is 5280’ so ballpark that’s 25 per side or 50 properties = 4,800$ per property every say 20 years or 240$ per year.
Not unreasonable if planned for and if other expenses are not chewing up all property tax revenue.
They make developers build them on the developer's dime, and then the roads don't need maintenance for a decade.
As long as your suburb keeps growing, the pain of maintaining decade-old roads can be offset by the increase in your tax base.
Once your suburb stops growing, you find yourself a mile down crap creek with no shovel.
In other words completely out of reach of the kind of town we're talking about?
All of this becomes expensive for single family homes to support. The revenue per area is just so low.
(... sorry, I couldn't pass up on that one.)