Not All Infrastructure Is Created Equal

An op-ed in the New York Daily News argues that Trump’s infrastructure plan “will result in wasteful spending and do little to fix crumbling facilities or promote economic growth” unless it is properly targeted, and the best way to target is to spend only on infrastructure that can be built and maintained with user fees.

The country should also avoid building new infrastructure that will soon be obsolete. For example, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) spent nearly half a billion dollars building the Airport Connector, a 3.2-mile elevated cable-car line to the Oakland Airport. BART expected to cover operating costs by charging people $6 to travel between the airport and the nearest BART station. Instead, it is losing money, and they are blaming Uber and Lyft. It was a dumb idea even if they did recover operating costs, but new technologies have made it even dumber still.

The Trump Administration needs to learn the Antiplanner’s Law of Transportation Infrastructure: Any transportation technology that requires new infrastructure is doomed to failure because it will be unable to compete against technologies using existing infrastructure such as the nation’s hundreds of commercial airports and millions of miles of highways.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

6 Responses to Not All Infrastructure Is Created Equal

  1. OFP2003 says:

    $500,000,000 for that!? you’ve got to be kidding me. It seems simple enough technology-wise, were the costs for concrete structure?

  2. Actually it was only $484 million, but that doesn’t include planning and engineering costs, which no doubt brought the total well above $500,000,000.

  3. JOHN1000 says:

    The Daily News and all the media have kept quiet for 8 years about “wasteful spending”. Now it will be front page every time a dollar is wasted under Trump.

    The only good thing about their hypocrisy is that it may actually do some good and keep Trump from doing the same things that the hypocrites cheered on…..

  4. Frank says:

    “The only good thing about their hypocrisy is that it may actually do some good and keep Trump from doing the same things that the hypocrites cheered on…..”

    Nice use of periods.

    But seriously. This headline: “Trump threatens ‘consequences’ for U.S. firms that relocate offshore”
    should make any Trump supporters here question their decision to vote for this fascist. He is pretty much mirroring what Hillary said about exit taxes.

    You voted for a Democrat.

  5. JOHN1000 says:

    So Frank says that if Trump does what Hillary would have done, he is a fascist. So Frank and friends supported Hillary because they liked fascism? Why didn’t they just say so before the election? Maybe the fascist vote would have carried the day for her. 🙂

  6. Frank says:

    He is a fascist in that he supports the economics of fascism, even more than Hillary, but the degree is slight. I didn’t support Hillary. She is a shrill bitch who screwed the socialist out of the Democratic nomination, just as the GOP screwed Ron Paul in 2002, but Ron Paul didn’t have Putin’s hackers, like Trump did, to come to his rescue to expose the fraud.

    Keep smiling, though, if it makes you feel more smug than you already feel. Just because I’m extremely anti-Trump doesn’t mean I’m pro-Clinton. Thinking so makes you a retard, just like Trump.

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