Charles de Gaulle is said to have remarked “How can you govern a country that has two hundred forty-six varieties of cheese?” I think the question might be asked equally of a country that has 607,380 bridges:
Calling for more infrastructure spending sounds great, and makes an easy sound bite, but without a coherent plan and sense of priorities, all the money in the world won’t fix what ails America’s roads.
The position I’ve tried to stake out here is that local travellers are in a much better position to determine what roads and bridges need repair than bureaucrats in Washington (or economists in New York) and one way to measure that is by what they’re willing to pay for. The civil engineers’ report is pretty frequently cited by those pointing out how much work there is to be done but the civil engineers are interested parties and tread a fine line between what might be done and what is worth doing.
