It’s basically a huge myth.

Years ago - well, really, decades ago, I came home to my father (an executive in the global oil industry) to impart some wisdom I had picked up in my Junior year Oil and International Diplomacy course.

Me:  We only have twenty years of oil left.

Dad:  We always only have twenty years of oil left.

Me: Huh?

Dad: My entire thirty-year career, people outside the oil industry have been concerned that we only have twenty years of oil left!  People inside the oil industry know that it is expensive and wasteful to explore for oil you don't need yet and won't need for the foreseeable future.  There is always routine exploration to replace what is used.  Twenty years is a safe inventory for current consumption and exploration for replacement.  

Not the first time I learned to be careful of what I was taught in school but certainly an embarrassing lesson.

Similarly, perhaps twenty or thirty years ago, the US were going through one of our periodic crazes about America's crumbling infrastructure.  Since I had recently lived in the northeast and worked extensively in the midwest, both locations with a lot of crumbling infrastructure owing to the decline in manufacturing, it was a very credible claim on the surface.  The rusted, corroded, slimy surface.

I don't recall what prompted me to spend a few hours researching the claim but I did.  And I found pretty much what Matthew Yglesias has found in America's "crumbling" roads and bridges are fine.  

There is a lot more happening in Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan than just throwing money at America’s crumbling roads and bridges. And it’s a good thing, too, because after years of being mildly annoyed by this rhetoric, I’ve actually been researching it and it’s basically a huge myth.

Not to say that there are zero roads or bridges in the United States that could use a little repair.

But there’s just no reason to believe that the existing surface transportation funding levels in the United States are inadequate. We have some of the best commute times in the world in an international context; our road quality is improving under current funding levels; and the biggest practical problem we have — endemic congestion in a few key metro areas — is not really amenable to being addressed with a big surge of funding.

[snip]

Back in 2019, Matthew Turner did a report for the Hamilton Project that has some eye-opening facts about America’s roads. Facts like “they keep getting better.”

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That’s not to say we shouldn’t spend money on roads. But I think it does strongly suggest that our basic ongoing level of road funding is fine. What we are currently spending is enough for the interstate highway system to steadily expand while simultaneously improving in quality. 

Yes - just as there is an optimum inventory of oil supplies, there is an optimum maintenance schedule for infrastructure.  Absent unexpected exogenous changes, spending more is wasteful and spending less is dangerous.

Being a good statist, though not the new breed of woke totalitarians, Yglesias just wants to spend that money on other programs, usually social.  He has a long list of criticisms of the US.

Could things be even better? Sure, probably.

But here’s something that I think is telling. Traditionally, the United States funded highway spending by collecting gas taxes as a kind of user fee. But the gas tax was last raised in 1993, and its real value has stagnated since then. Everyone seems to agree that raising it further is politically unviable. There has been some brief discussion by pointy-head types in both parties of creating a new Vehicle Miles Traveled tax to fund roads, but once it became clear that Biden was not doing this in a bipartisanship-seeking way, his team dropped that idea really fast.

This all seems like smart politics to me. But it’s smart politics with a message — the message is that America’s driving public is happy enough with the quality of the roads that they don’t want to pay any extra money for the sake of improving them.

As Kevin Drum notes, the World Economic Forum surveys say that America has some of the best roads in the world. Our bridge failure rate is also normal and fine.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

As to those other valuable programs on which Yglesias wants to spend the money saved from repairing highways?  They are usually on even weaker empirical ground than the bridges are crumbling myth.  Spend a few hours on them and the causes are more complex, the solutions more expensive, the effect sizes smaller, the improvements less frequently achieved, etc.  

Yglesias is an enthusiast for public transportation despite the continuing multi-decadal failure across the US in terms of cost efficiency, operational effectiveness, and ridership.  Yglesias is a statist who wants centrally planned solutions to be imposed on a highly diverse country with enormously complex issues.  He wants to use Europe as a template despite fundamental differences.  Public transportation is a solution driven by costs, density and productivity.  Sufficient density is not a problem for many parts of Europe.  In a continent/country of 330 million, density in the US is simply insufficient to deliver the desired outcomes sought from mass transit in most locations.

It is a complex world and relying on a free system bounded by law and powered by individual decisions driving emergent order is going to make more people better off than any the alternative hallucinatory centrist plans.

Kudos to Yglesias for being enough of a Classical Liberal using empiricism, logic and reason, to see past at least some of the false claims in regards to crumbling infrastructure.