Everywhere has plenty of things to complain about. I’d like to spend less in taxes, always.
But at least it does feel, objectively, like we live in a mostly lovely place that actually does protect employees, have access to great healthcare, great roads, great charging infrastructure (relative to the rest of the US) and so on.
Interesting! Quite contrary from the prevailing wisdom - snow and salt destroy the roads. Maybe they don’t make them well to begin with.
Same thing happens with California/Nevada.
I-15 is wide, flat, beautiful and flawless on the Nevada side. As soon as you hit California, it's like a rural county road with no maintenance.
Funny, because it's in the Las Vegas newspapers every six months or so how the mayor of Las Vegas and the governor of Nevada are always begging California to upgrade its side of I-15.
Almost every month there are 14-hour traffic jams on Sunday night as the SoCal crowd scurries home only to hit the bottleneck at the California border where I-15 goes from six lanes to four, then twists its way through the mountains.
I've driven it many dozens of times in the last ten years, and it's well known among people who live in Nevada.
California is rated poorly on roads on average because they have a lot of rural/mountainous terrain to cover. In the cities where most people live, the roads are actually pretty good.
For a state that often bemoans the federal government and its out of control spending, Texas takes an impressive amount of funds and puts it into a very high-quality and modern interstate system.
Texas will receive over $27 billion (with a B) over the next ~5 years in federal funding for highways and bridges alone. $10 billion was allocated across 2022-2023. Many of their roads are quite nice and only going to improve. Thanks, Uncle Sam!
I’m in the same boat, have driven just about everywhere and I haven’t seen any major correlation.
Of course, we just got a library card in their district and I enjoyed the use of the nicer library as well. But still.
There’s a list floating around by some personal finance blog that ranks the states based on effective tax rate across most taxes citizens are subject to and Texas consistently ends up remarkably high on that list due to the other taxes being relatively high.
Texas is essentially the personification of a low sticker price with hidden fees (e.g., “starts at $0”).
But by and large, CA does have great public school, and top-tier public universities.
A major issue in SF proper is that crews are constantly digging up parts of roads to work on pipes or whatever, and then patch them in a haphazard, crappy way. Roads get fully resurfaced rarely. As an example, there's a super nasty patched and re-patched and re-patched and re-patched section of 18th St (between Minnesota and Tennessee) that has been a nightmare for at least 4 years now.
A section of Tennessee between 18th and 19th was resurfaced about a year ago (in part because there was building construction along the road that did heavy damage), but just this past week they were digging up a large section in the center of the road to do some work underneath, and when they patched it up, they as usual did a crap job, so the road sucks again.
I grew up in New Jersey (80s) and Maryland (90s), and the roads were much better maintained in both of those places, Maryland especially.
I’ll put it this way too: while I’m mindful of potholes, generally, I have yet to have a single issue popping any of my 21” thin sidewall summer tires on my >5500lb EV.
My counterparts in the South have popped between 2 and 10 depending on who you ask. The answer each time is: hit a pothole.
Some of that’s driving. Some of it is also just the roads. They’re far from perfect. But they’re better than most other states.
I live in San Francisco and absolutely disagree with this. The roads are garbage. And lest we think that's just a city thing, whenever I leave the city and drive out on local and state roads they range from garbage to ok-ish.
My family moved to Maryland when I was a teenager, and the roads there were pristine (90s, not sure about nowadays). It felt like some section of some road or highway near me was always being resurfaced.