The know the roads are but because it is a physical infrastructure they don't pay attention.
Look at the Post Office issues recently, from your comment.
Welcome to US politics.
When I went to the CA DMV to get my real id, the person helping me was very pleasant and nice. I told her this was in remarkable contrast to my usual DMV experience, and she told me “we’re the new generation.”
There's probably some locations that are chronically busy, but I've had the luck to not use them.
I’ve known people that have worked at the DMV on a temporary basis and they would get in trouble every time they got work done because they made regular people look bad.
The idea is is that if you can not fire a person, department, agency or whatever but you’re forced to use them than the end result will often be bad.
Basically the exact same reasons that most people hate HOAs.
https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/outlays-GDP....
but in this case, they are not 'providing timely and cost-effective services', so is it really a myth?
If the belief is that there is no way that the government could ever provide good services, then the only solution seems to be to get rid of them and have someone else provide good services. The challenge I see with this solution is that private service providers have a very very strong incentive to get people to believe that this is the only solution: it's hard to compete with an effective monopoly.
If the belief is that they could provide good services, then we might see that maybe they don't provide good services for a number of reasons and try to improve them as well.
EXAMPLE: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/biden-cannot-fir...
> The challenge I see with this solution is that private service providers have a very very strong incentive to get people to believe that this is the only solution: it's hard to compete with an effective monopoly.
One political party has been devoted to handicapping government functions at every possible point for at least 40 years, and still some parts of the government continue to function well, so well that people don't even notice or think about them.
People notice the IRS--underfunded on purpose, and with intense lobbying to ensure it is illegal to provide a higher quality of service--and the DMV--underfunded in most states--but not anything else that works cost-effectively, like public schools or the USPS.