This assumes it’s significantly cheaper to build new roads than to rebuild them which seems false on the surface. It could be that replacing more roads at the same time would drive down costs. If replacing ~600’ of roads is 600$/foot how about replacing 10 miles of roads?
In theory what should happen is the resulting development pays enough taxes to pay for all the infrastructure it depends on to be rebuilt as needed (typically every 15-30 years depending on which kind of infra we're talking about). But in practice the taxes are not actually linked to the cost of infrastructure (they are much too low) and not enough funds are collected to maintain the infra.
This is managed by a shell game where fees from new developments (who just financialized their new infra) are used to pay the maintenance on old projects that are losing money, and where federal subsidies for growth and expansion are contorted to uses like widening a scarcely used road that is falling part (bc. the feds will pay to expand but not to maintain) - which solves the problem for now by making it even worse for the next generation.
Cities also "financialize" the whole thing by selling bonds. The real difference is that when the developers originally build roads at their own expense (recouping it by the sale of the properties they developed), they pay much less than what the city then pays later to repave them. If you frame the question instead "why does the government pay so much more than private companies for the same products and services", it pretty much answers itself.
There are many stories where rebuilding or just renovation of a bridge was vastly more expensive than constructing it 50 or 100 years ago (yes, obviously after adjusting for inflation).
https://www.curt.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Productivity...
Rebuilding projects are contemplated in the shadow of actual returns, which are harder to lie about.
Roads are like startups! We should get VCs in on the action.
I see what you did there...
After the sale, the town only gets tax revenue which is a lot less.
If I had to do this, I’d try to figure out a privacy-preserving way to record Bluetooth IDs since most cars have Bluetooth beacons those now and try to do it regionally so you could address questions of fairness (e.g. I go to 4 places doing errands. How much does each one get assessed?). You’d also need to do this regularly to avoid sampling skew (how much does peak holiday demand at the mall count for?) and that really means you’d need to have a robust privacy policy with teeth.
It’s also not the developers job to consider the long term maintenance and tax implications of these developments. That’s the responsibility of the city itself through plan approval and zoning.
If they didn’t have to pay for the roads to begin with they have 30 years to set aside money for the replacement. Even minimal interest would drastically reduce their out of pocket costs. Grants turn this into a question of bad fiscal management, which is definitely an issue but says little about how much infrastructure they have.