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If you want more walkable cities you have to stop subsidizing the suburban sprawl that has been paid for with debt spending. The infrastructure that is falling apart around us is happening because its unsustainable, and if we just print 1T dollars every few years to kick the can down the road all you do is create a bigger problem to be solved in 20 years.

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American suburbs are largely a Ponzi scheme. They start out with loads of funding to build out all of the infrastructure and then in 20 years they can not afford to replace it all so they are funded by building another suburb. Eventually most of them will fail or some economic trick will be pulled to fund them.

If the full 1.2T were actually on roads, we would have much nicer roads. Quite a bit of it goes to not-car spending.

If that specific bill was the only debt we were printing to subsidize car dependence it would be bad enough, however the majority of spending is done by municipalities which sits currently at 4T and its estimated we need to add 6T to that over the next 10 years to keep up with repairs. After we have spent that 10T we will then have to repair all the roads built in the past 20 years which is growing at about 500,000 miles of roads per decade.

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