Tag: Infrastructure

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE | Lex Fridman Podcast #462

Posted on by Lone Candle

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE | Lex Fridman Podcast #462

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPSeeKokdo

Report: California Continues To Spend a Lot of Money on Poor Quality Roads

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The 2025 report ranks state highway systems across a range of metrics, including capital and maintenance spending, rural and urban pavement quality, traffic congestion, bridge quality, and safety.
Similar to reports in recent years, North Carolina and Virginia continue to be top performers, respectively ranking first and fourth on this year’s report. (Virginia was ranked first on last year’s report.)

Both states scored high on pavement quality and relatively low highway spending. Feigenbaum chalks this up to these states using quantitative metrics to select highway projects and having dedicated maintenance units within their departments of transportation.

States like California that rely less on more politicized processes to select projects tend to rank much lower on the report. Despite being one of the highest spending states, it has some of the worst pavement quality, worst traffic congestion, and an uninspiring safety record.

“You can spend above average if everything else in your system is good and still get an excellent ranking,” says Feigenbaum, pointing to Utah (which scored eighth on the report) as an example. The state’s spending is on the high side, but it also ranks highly on pavement quality, safety, and congestion.

States like California and New Jersey both spend a lot of money for no apparent improvement in performance.”

https://reason.com/2025/03/13/report-california-continues-to-spend-a-lot-of-money-on-poor-quality-roads/

Biden’s Infrastructure Bills Leave a Legacy of Big Spending and Little Payoff

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act apportioned more than $1 trillion to a wide variety of projects deemed “infrastructure,” including $550 billion toward “‘new’ investments and programs.” Among its line items, the law included $7.5 billion to build electric vehicle (E.V.) chargers across the country.

The rollout was uninspiring. Under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which controls $5 billion of the $7.5 billion total, only 183 chargers have come online at 44 stations across the country, more than three years after Biden signed the bill into law. (Under federal rules, each station funded by the law is required to have at least four charging ports.)

In fairness, not all of the cash has been spent: The NEVI has only allocated $2.4 billion and awarded $520 million, as of press time.

Still, it’s a dispiriting result from an administration that came into office with big promises to “build a national network of 500,000 charging stations.”

Similarly, the 2021 infrastructure law included the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, with $42 billion to expand broadband internet access across the country. In his speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Biden equated it with the New Deal, calling the broadband expansion “not unlike what Roosevelt did with electricity.”

But three years after its creation, the program has disbursed no money and supplied broadband to zero households. “Thanks to a federal affordability requirement that telecommunications companies say is too tight, many states have sparred with Washington over their funding applications, delaying the rollout,” Politico wrote in September.”

…

“Biden’s supporters would counter that while the initial rollout was underwhelming, much of this spending is designed to pay off over time: NEVI, for example, is apportioned $1 billion per year through FY 2026 when the program’s funding runs out.”

…

“it’s clear by this point that Biden’s big-spending dreams were hamstrung by bureaucracy and red tape, much of which was included in the bills themselves or in administration guidelines.”

https://reason.com/2025/01/08/bidens-infrastructure-bills-leave-a-legacy-of-big-spending-and-little-payoff/

Fixing Sick Cities (with Alain Bertaud)

Posted on by Lone Candle

Cities should not have minimum apartment sizes. Such restrictions make city living more expensive, preventing some people from moving or staying there, and worsening homelessness. Some people can live just fine in tiny apartments and spend time in city amenities while utilizing the city’s intellectual and job benefits.

https://www.econlib.org/econtalk/

The most dangerous roads in America have one thing in common

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Although only 14 percent of urban road miles nationwide are under state control, two-thirds of all crash deaths in the 101 largest metro areas occur there, according to a recent Transportation for America report. In some places, this disparity is widening: From 2016 to 2022, road fatalities in Austin, Texas, fell 20 percent on locally managed roads while soaring 98 percent on those the state oversees.”

…

“Instead of fixing such roadways, state officials tend to keep them as they are, citing limited resources or a need to maintain traffic speeds. In doing so, they constrain the capacity of even the most comprehensive local reforms to respond to urgent problems like car crash deaths, which are far more widespread in the US than among peer countries, or unreliable bus service.
Unless state DOTs recognize that a successful urban road must do more than facilitate fast car trips, that problem will persist.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/384562/state-highways-dots-car-crashes-pedestrian

Abolish the Department of Transportation

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Countries that have turned over air traffic control operations to separate nonprofit corporations are able to buy and deploy new technology as it becomes available. The FAA’s technological procurements must go through the slow-grinding federal budget process. While air traffic controllers in the U.K., Canada, and Germany are using satellite guidance, digital communications, and remote centers to guide planes, U.S. controllers are stuck using ground radar and radio communications. That’s despite the FAA spending billions on modernization.”

https://reason.com/2024/11/14/abolish-the-department-of-transportation/

Elon Musk assures voters that Trump’s victory would deliver “temporary hardship”

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Were Trump to implement Musk’s vision while simultaneously honoring his promise to avoid cutting entitlements and the GOP’s commitment to avoiding defense spending cuts, then he would need to slash all other government programs by 80 percent. That would involve gutting all social services for low-income Americans, food inspections, air safety, health insurance subsidies, and infrastructure investments, among countless other things.
This would abruptly and massively reduce demand in the US economy, potentially triggering a recession.

There is little reason to expect such severe and haphazard spending cuts to benefit the economy in the long term. After all, government investments in education and infrastructure often increase the economy’s growth potential — slashing funding for such programs could impair America’s economic performance in the coming decades.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/381637/elon-musk-donald-trump-2024-election-temporary-hardship