Street spending out of whack
2014-04-28 14:42:13.001403+00 by
Dan Lyke
1 comments
Wisconsin is about to build a freeway interchange that costs $5.39 per every single person in the United States:
The Zoo Interchange carries 300,000 cars per day. It is “Wisconsin’s oldest and busiest interchange,” according to the state. A big part of Wisconsin DOT’s justification for the Milwaukee interchange is “safety.” According to WisDOT, there were an average of 2.5 collisions a day on the interchange between 2000 and 2005, and nine were fatal.
By comparison, according to the 2009 National Household Travel Survey, Americans make about 112 million walking trips daily. About 4,000 pedestrians are killed annually on American roads.
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2014-04-28 16:09:45.642473+00 by:
Dan Lyke
So: $1.7 billion. Amortize that out over 30 years, assume you'll need to maintain it, back of the envelope we figure money costs $600/$100k/month, so that's ten million bucks a month.
300,000 cars per day * 30, that's 9 million trips per month, or a little over a buck a day per car. Which we're sure not recovering from gas taxes. Let's say sales tax is 10%, and surmise that a tenth of that gets earmarked for transportation, so that interchange has to inject a hundred bucks per trip into the local retail economy (or similar value into the economy in other ways).
And that's not even counting all of the other negative externalities that encouraging that automobile use lays on us.