TIME did an article recently on the stimulus package (What Happened to the Stimulus?) and there was one factual statement (on p. 2 of the linked article) that caught my eye:
I’m a bit curious why this should be so. Is it just the time-lag in designing and tendering a new highway? or are there more factors involved? I would have thought that highway construction and maintenance would have had roughly the same impact?
(And, I’m not looking for a debate on the stimulus itself, whether it’s a good or bad idea, or whether Sarah Palin would make a good road construction worker. I’m just curious about this statement about the economic impact of new roads v. road repair.)
From being close to these sorts of things, my spouse is an accountant in the public sector, I would guess that a big reason might be the time delay in getting the land to build new roads.
I would imagine that you can have more people working per length of existing (damaged) road than working building a road. If you’re building a road, you start at point A and work along the end of the road until you hit point M. On an existing road, you can have road crews working on points A, B, D, F through J and M all at the same time.
keeping down costs probably refers to the fact that it is cheaper to fill in potholes now than totally repave later.
I’ve read in Mr. Roadshow that the average driver in the Bay Area spends somewhat over $100 in car repairs due to bad roads. Also, a good road probably allows traffic to flow faster, which makes for a short, more efficient commute and a savings on gas. My gas mileage has gone up somewhere over 10% due to a combination of the completion of a road upgrade that eliminated a bottleneck and the recession which takes a lot of cars off the road.
However I agree with others that getting the money spent more quickly with less disruption is the main reason.
There’s also the matter of location. Most of the time, if there’s already a road someplace, it’s because there’s a need for a road in that particular place. If your new road were such a great idea, someone would likely have already built one there.
There’s a lot more to a road than just the pavement. There’s a sub-base, and a base course to put down first. Those are comprised of more material than the pavement portion is. If you maintain/repair the pavement then you don’t have to spend the money redoing the roadway base. Diagram.
If you go with a totally new alignment in your road, you will also have to install new culverts & bridges. If you maintain/repair, you are reusing the old structures.
Wish I lived there, then. I can attribute every problem I’ve ever had with my car to bad roads, and it’s over $1000, plus whatever the manufacturer spent when it was still in warranty. Tie rods, ball joints, that sort of stuff. When I look at warranty claims (obviously only during the warranty periods), I see huge spikes in Michigan! Unfortunately the figures are only by subsystem (“chassis,” “body,” etc.) and dollar value, so I can’t say what the specific parts are.
That was average, remember? (And it might have been closer to $400.) Some people have written in with stories like yours. Supposedly if you get damaged because of a gigantic pothole, or a bad repair, the state will pay you something, but I’m dubious.
Yeah, but it’s never a single event in my case. It’s really my refusal to drive like an idiot (i.e., slow) just because the roads are in bad condition. My suspension is perfectly fine, and I’ve never had to service it yet. It’s a lot more comfortable (and fuel efficient) to let the front end take the wear, than to slow down and speed up every 25 feet.
Another concern with stimulus projects (I know that’s not your main concern, but bear with me) is the “shovel-readiness.” They want projects that can get going right away. A road that already has holes in it, that already needs work, etc. is “shovel ready.” The city has done the necessary bidding, planning, etc. They just need the money and go!
For example, our city here has an insurance policy for things like that; if your car is damaged due to something that the city is responsible for, you make a claim on the insurance. The state or county may be similar.
Part of it is that repair and resurfacing of roads does take a lot of manpower and equipment–usually to do it right (i.e. for a ‘50-year fix’) a company has to mill up old asphalt/remove old concrete, recompact the base and subbase, and then lay down new pavement on top. There’s a lot of work to prepare an old asphalt roadway and turn it into a concrete roadway (it’s a different design since asphalt is nothing more than a glorified rain cover for the base courses below) and vice versa. So yeah, to do it right, you have to rip out the old, and put in the new.
But then again, to put new roads down, there’s a crapload of real estate that has to be appropriated, with all of the easements, rights of way, and engineering/acquisition to go with. Does Uncle $ugardaddy really want to waste all that stimulus money on litigation? Hell no. He’d rather put that money into shovels turning dirt.
Tripler
IMHO, it’s better to rehab the old than to start plowing up someone’s front yard.
