By Scott Lazenby
Governing
When you live or travel in a third-world country, you can’t take basic infrastructure for granted. Water might come out of a faucet when you turn it on, or it might not. Electric lights might work, or they might not. Something might happen when you flush a toilet, but you probably don’t want to know where the sewage goes.
Here in the U.S., we don’t accept these kinds of conditions. We have little tolerances for outages of services like cable TV and cellphones, water, electricity, natural gas, garbage collection and Internet access. We insist on, and pay for, reliable provision of all the basic services. Except one: roads and highways.
We put up with crumbling highways, falling bridges and frequent failures of service--congestion caused by systems pushed beyond capacity. In this area, we are solidly in the third-world camp. What’s wrong with us?
Part of the answer is defeatism. You can’t build your way out of congestion, the pundits tell us. Add a lane to a freeway, and development and driving patterns will shift so the new lane is quickly pushed beyond capacity. Adding capacity is therefore futile.
But this is only true because we give the service away for free. If we didn’t meter electricity or water, there is no doubt these systems would be equally over-subscribed.
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