Improving infrastructure is one of the few things politicians on the left and right agree to spend money on. Unfortunately, most of that money is a waste. In November, President Biden signed a 1.2 trillion dollar spending bill that was 1,032 pages long. According to the World Economic Forum, the United States infrastructure ranks 13th in the world. So there is room to improve but we are not in dire need comparatively speaking. The biggest problem the United States faces in regards to infrastructure is not infrastructure itself, but rather the cost of improving it.
Consider the case of tunnels. New York City constructed a three-station subway at the cost of $1.7 billion per kilometer and potentially adding a second phase at $2.2 billion per kilometer. Compare that to Berlin’s U-55 that cost $250 million per kilometer and Paris’s Metro Line-14 that cost just $230 million per kilometer. That means New York City spends at least seven times as much money on similar projects in Europe.
Israeli mathematician, Alon Levy, estimates between 2005 and 2030 New York will have spent $35 billion on subway and commuter rail projects in exchange for fifteen kilometers of new tunnel. During the same period, Paris will have spent 40 billion euros on 187 kilometers of new tunnels and an additional 40 kilometers on above ground tracks. From 1995 to 2015, Madrid built 234 kilometers of tunnels for just 10 billion euros. There is still some hope for optimism on future infrastructure projects though; namely New York is not the United States.
Reason Magazine does an annual highway report that compares each state’s infrastructure on 13 qualities and then ranks the states. New York ranks 46, North Dakota ranks number 1, and New Jersey is ranked 50th. North Dakota spends $26,943.00 per mile of state-controlled which ranks 2nd in total spending per mile and 11th in capital and bridge costs per mile. New Jersey spends $1,136,255.00 per mile of state-controlled road, which is the highest in the nation - 50th in total spending per mile and 50th in capital and bridge costs per mile. But looking at fatality rate New Jersey ranks 4th with .71 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles. While North Dakota ranks 20th with 1.02 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles.
There are three states with lower fatality rates than New Jersey - Vermont (3), Minnesota (2), and Massachusetts (1). Vermont spends $78,883 per mile of state-controlled road - 25th in total spending per mile and 21st in capital and bridge costs per mile. Minnesota spends $80,561 per mile of state-controlled road - 27th in total spending per mile and 23rd in capital and bridge costs per mile. Massachusetts spends $345,947 per mile of state-controlled road - 48th in total spending per mile and 42nd in capital and bridge costs per mile. So even if the goal is to have the absolute lowest fatalities related to infrastructure, it is not unreasonable to think it could be done for less than half of what New Jersey does it for or even to imagine the cost to be less than $100,000 per mile.
The cost of infrastructure in parts of the United States is far too high. If costs for improving infrastructure could be more in line with Minnesota or Vermont, $1.2 trillion would literally go a lot further. But for now we have to deal with spending a lot of money for comparatively little in return.
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