When Is It Time to Pull the Plug on a Budget-Busting Road?
It's a nearly universal condition across North America that we fail to account for the long-term implications of our infrastructure decisions. One cause of this, as Strong Towns has described before, is the failure to recognize that a street is a budgetary liability, not an asset. Every time we build one, we are accepting a long-term obligation to maintain and eventually replace it—and yet with the way local governments (unlike the private sector) practice accounting, this obligation appears nowhere on any public balance sheet. At least not until repair of that street makes its way into the likes of a 5-year Capital Improvement Plan.
The result is that even cities that are generally thought to be well-run, stable places can systematically underfund maintenance for not one or two years but decades, because there's no mechanism requiring them to reckon with this underfunding until things reach crisis state.
And when things do reach crisis state, the sunk cost fallacy tends to limit our thinking. No elected official wants to sign off on a failure, and nothing appears to shout "failure" like, "Let's walk away from this mistake and let it crumble." Only sometimes that's exactly the right thing to do.
Time to Stop Pouring Money Into the Ravine
Take, for example, a somehow-still-unfolding saga in America's Most Livable City™, St. Paul, Minnesota. Bill Lindeke over at Streets.mn has written a thorough and compelling piece urging St. Paul to cut its losses and close a controversial road. He opens by admitting he would rather not be writing the piece at all, because its subject matter has been a thorn in the city's side for a Very. Long. Time.
St. Paul with Ayd Mill Road highlighted in red.
Lindeke’s piece has a lot of local detail. For non-Minnesotans who want fuller context, here's a brief history of Ayd Mill Road. If you’re a normal human who doesn’t want to spend half an hour reading up on background, this will suffice: It's a pseudo-freeway built alongside a rail corridor that runs through a ravine in a mostly residential part of St. Paul. The road serves primarily as an incomplete shortcut between two freeways—I-94 and I-35E—that is handy for those traveling to or from certain southern suburbs.
Ayd Mill Road has structural problems, in part because the ravine it’s built in is an unstable creek bed. It is crumbling and unsafe. And yet the city can’t seem to reach a permanent solution. Every time closing the road is proposed, it elicits a tremendous outcry from drivers who fear traffic congestion on nearby surface streets. (A fear that is likely unwarranted if you know anything about induced demand.)
A proposal in 2019 by Mayor Melvin Carter was seen as a (partial) victory for urbanist, environmental and cycling advocates who regard the road as an unpleasant scar cutting through the city for the benefit of suburban drivers: Carter’s proposal would have cut the road back to two lanes (one in each direction) and added a bike/walk trail alongside it. Now that proposal is in jeopardy because the city’s estimates of the project cost have almost doubled from $5.2 million to $9.8 million—in a city whose total maintenance budget deficit is $20 to $24 million per year.
To cut costs, Public Works is recommending narrowing the proposed bike/walk trail by half, as well as keeping the road at 3 lanes instead of 2, to simplify the reconstruction (fewer turn lanes would need to be constructed, among other changes).
Lindeke is irked that the project is being described as a bike trail project, contributing to perceptions that bicycling infrastructure is an expensive luxury in a city that can’t keep its streets paved, even though he estimates the cost of a bike trail alone at only $500,000:
Once again, the real issue here is cars. This two-mile suburban short-cut costs a ton because of cars. And in 2020, facing huge challenges, the simple truth is that Saint Paul can’t afford to throw money into this pit any longer.
The courageous and necessary thing to do about Ayd Mill Road is to stop throwing good money after bad, and simply shut it down.
This, says Lindeke, would open up a whole new set of community conversations about what would be a worthwhile return on investment. And that conversation might well even include a bike path and other park-like features that have been on the table in the past:
What if we closed the road and had an honest, community conversation about the real cost of this two-mile shortcut? What if the city laid out, in black-and-white, what the trade-offs look like for the city’s street maintenance budget? What if we came up with an estimate of the long-term, reconstruction cost of Ayd Mill Road? Why not ask people all over the city how they want the space used, and how they want their very precious tax dollars spent?
Once we closed Ayd Mill Road and took the long term liability off the books, Saint Paul residents and taxpayers could have a much more interesting discussion about what to do. In this scenario, building a biking and walking path would be an affordable (ideally, grant funded) no-brainer. Meanwhile, the rest of the land could be used in countless ways: for community gardens, people parks, dog parks, playgrounds, housing, a day-lit creek, or a dozen things I can’t even imagine.
On the one hand, this whole story is an example of the pitfall of attaching bike/walk projects—which are comparatively inexpensive and often high-returning investments—to expensive car infrastructure projects as add-ons. Advocates tend to push for this because it’s often the only way such active transportation projects get funded, because we have a political environment in which driving infrastructure gets a presumptive benefit of the doubt that other things do not. Of course we need to repave the road. We can’t just not repave the road. If the budget is too tight, the quality of the biking and walking facility is the first thing to be sacrificed. Rarely if ever is the auto-centric project reconsidered entirely.
So on the other hand, maybe the lesson here is that we can just not repave the road. Or that sooner or later, that decision is going to be made for us.
Triage Mode
St. Paul has a huge maintenance funding problem. It’s hard to overstate. Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn wrote back in September about the bleak picture of the city’s public works budget as described by Mayor Melvin Carter in the Star Tribune. A 2018 Pioneer Press article on the topic stated that St. Paul’s repair funding at the time covered “about eight miles per year out of 850 miles of city streets.” It doesn’t take a math or engineering degree to know that 106 years to repair every street citywide is not going to fly: not when the lifespan of asphalt, especially in a place with brutal winters and freeze-thaw cycles, is far less than that.
Image via Bill Lindeke / Streets.mn
According to Lindeke, who sits on St. Paul’s Planning Commission:
The problem is that the city’s street maintenance budget has long been underfunded…. According to my notes from the meeting with Public Works, the city needs another $20 to $24 million dollars annually to keep the Pavement Condition Index around 65-70 (aka., an acceptable level) in the long term.
The result is that our city streets are poised on the edge of a fiscal maintenance cliff because streets don’t age in a linear way. Because of where our city streets are in their “lifecycle”, it’s very difficult for the city to perform cost-efficient maintenance. Saint Paul public works is forced instead to do expensive and inefficient quick fixes instead of long-term reconstructions. It’s similar to paying a debt when the interest rate keeps going up, so that eventually you’re not even reducing the principal. The charts that I saw during that meeting showed how quickly city streets will deteriorate over the next five years if more money cannot be found somewhere.
This situation means that Saint Paul should be entering a triage mode when it comes to its streets. The city needs to think carefully about where it spends its scarce resources, and that goes double if regressive sales taxes are funding the street system.
Selling the concept of “triage mode” politically is of course the harder problem. But a city with a maintenance deficit in the tens of millions of dollars per year doesn’t have a choice. You can have the hard conversation now or you can have it later. Your choice, St. Paul.