America's infrastructure debt is so bad that towns are unpaving roads they can't afford to fix / Boing Boing
Here is what 35 years of ignoring the need to maintain public infrastructure have brought us:
"The chickens are coming home to roost in rural America, where paved roads have been neglected so long that they are effectively beyond repair, prompting municipalities to tear them up and replace them with car-smashing gravel roads whose dust pose a health hazard to residents and livestock."
2 comments:
First of all, some rural roads do not need to be paved, and may be better off as a dirt or gravel road. For example, it works better for horses and livestock. Fine for farm tractors, too. For cars--not so much. But that brings me to my second point. Not everyone wants to live the ubran life. Some are happy in a small town, others out in the countryside. If it works for them, let it be.
Now, on the other hand, city and suburban roads, or County roads DO need to be maintained. But in too many cases, the roads have not been well-maintained. My question is, what did the government do with all the tax money it collected in the form of property taxes, fuel taxes, and highway and turnpike tolls? What about all the money local governements collect from HOAs, especially the ones that are stuck maitnainting their OWN roads on top of paying taxes to maintain all the public roads?
HOAs that are 30+ years old are now facing the problem of crumbling private roads and not enough money to fix them, too.
Both government and HOAs tend to spend the money they collect on OTHER stuff, because, I guess, spending the money on basics such as keeping roads in good repair is just too boring.
Where did the money paid by all those HOA-burdened houses go? The HOA residents had to pay privately for their own roads while they were taxed for the public roads too. The municipalities benefited by getting the tax money without providing the service (paved roads) for the HOA denizens. The HOA denizens pay twice - taxes to the local government and assessments to the HOA - and apparently neither the HOA nor the local government has any obligation to utilize the money for the purposes it was ostensibly collected for. Money is paid, service not rendered. If the homeowner doesn't pay he/she gets foreclosed on. This is nothing but theft of dollars from the property owner.
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