Roads and highways have been a multi-trillion-dollar subsidy for Ford, GM, and Chrysler since the 1920s. It's bizarre how blind everyone is to that.
The reason we have 8 lane highways etc is because of private automobile use, and the enormous space inefficiency of automobiles, of private vehicles being driven back and forth with single travellers in them.
We've gone too deep into fundamentally inefficient private automobile use and are having to spend a fortune on the infrastructure to keep that paradigm functional.
I'm always amazed when someone thinks they've trumped anarchist political science by asking, "by who will pave the roads?!"
Scaling back road pavement is one of the things to which I most look forward in the retracting state apparatus.
I think I remember reading that when the Matrix sequel came out, they spent something like $10 million building a 1-mile length of highway. I assume that this was neither much cheaper nor much more expensive than building the real would have been.
Which fallacy is it when you make a false equivalence between some gigantic construction product in the modern world, and someone having cleared some brush in the pre-modern world, all because we happen to use the same word to label both things?