Infrastructure
We can't afford the roads we build, and we're building the wrong ones.
The county has put a number on what it would take to fix traffic here. It's about $4.3 billion. A little over a billion of that is funded. The rest, roughly $3.3 billion, doesn't exist and nobody has a plan for it. Most road money comes from gas taxes and state and federal grants. Property taxes barely touch it. Tolls haven't gone up since 2007.
Two years ago the county's answer was a one percent sales tax, around $245 million a year, most of it out of the pockets of people who already live here. Which is worth sitting with for a second, because the hole it was meant to fill is the same hole the county dug by charging developers half price for a decade.
But even if you found the money, I don't think we'd be much better off, because the problem isn't only that we can't pay for the roads. It's what we're buying. We build one kind of road here: wide, posted fast, with a traffic light every quarter mile. It's the most expensive kind to maintain, it's the most dangerous kind for everyone using it, and it doesn't even move traffic well. Post a road at 45 and stop it every 1,300 feet and the average speed ends up around half the limit. MLK, parts of 41, McGregor, the main corridors through the Cape and Lehigh. Those are the roads where people get killed, and it isn't because of the drivers.
We spent decades widening 41 and got more crashes and more congestion out of it. It's over capacity now, and there's nowhere left to widen. Meanwhile every lane we add anywhere is a lane we owe maintenance on forever, so the gap between what we need and what we can pay doesn't close as we build. It gets wider.
What I'd rather do is stop asking one road to do two jobs. A road is for moving people through. A street is a place where people stop, and shop, and spend money. We keep building things that try to be both and end up bad at each, and then we pay to repave them for the rest of our lives. Slow the streets in the places where people actually live, and let the arterials move without a light every few hundred feet. Fewer lane miles isn't a cut. It's the only version of this we can actually afford.
Go deeper