The economic consequences illustrated here are not the cause of "classic liberalism," a term we can debate (linking to wikipedia is not sufficient), but to libertarianism. Strong Towns should not make this mistake. It makes it hard for "modern liberals" fighting for civil rights/duties and fair playing fields - social equality, more responsible government AND leaner markets - to read or listen to the arguments when the noted causes are so skewed. We continue to overspend on infrastructure because of two things: ignorance about the real costs and long term consequences AND short term special interests, primarily private market pressures on government. I also agree with some of the other comments that ask Strong Towns to stop beating the overspending dead horse, recognize the real benefits of investment that promotes local returns and offer real solutions. You've been addressing those ingrained causes of ignorance but tend to gloss over the strong market interests. Follow the money.

I adhere to Lord Acton's warning, "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." 1887 Interestingly, this was Sodom and Gomorrah's problem -- powerful rulers were corrupt and abused the poor, the weak and strangers. Thus, civilization has recognized the danger of unrestrained power. The US Constitution sought to limit the pernicious influence of power by balancing one type of power against another type such as one finds in a Republic.

The Greek philosophers may be most noted for seeking out the form of government which provided for the best of the general welfare which was really no different than the Sodom story or the Declaration of Independence. Power leads to corruption because people make decisions only to help themselves. Los Angles has become a dying city because it is ruled by a criminal enterprise based upon mutual bribery which funnels as much money to the top 1% as possible while degrading the lives of average Angelenos. As long as any society's goal is to make the most powerful people the most wealthy and damn everyone else, disaster will follow disaster.

I posted this article on my own Facebook page, with the following comment. I really would like to understand better which construction projects Strong Towns considers excess, and which ones are good investment in the community.
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Strong Towns has been beating the too-much-infrastructure drum for a while now. I wish they offered more specific examples of what they're talking about. I can think of a few: Detroit's Silverdome and Tiger Stadium; Houston's Astrodome.

Is a big park, a big theater, a performing arts center an example? (Two cities of my youth, Schenectady and Pittsfield, have resurrected old theaters from the brink of ruin.) A museum that runs out of money and sells off much of its collection when the city is economically pressed? (Pittsfield). A bridge? A great public school? A highway that brought jobs to the area? (I know, I know -- I'm picking for a fight with that example. But Pittsfield never had a highway, and that is considered a major factor in its demise.)

I have a rule of thumb (which has a basis):

If it costs more than $1B, it probably shouldnt be done.

There was an econtalk on megaprojects a few years back, which were defined as above. 90% are late. 90% are over budget. 90% fail to deliver what was promised. And those 3 variables are mostly independent, meaning only 1 in 1000 megaprojects hits all 3 goals.

In almost every case, it would be better to do 10,000 $100k projects instead of the $1B one.

Rob -- by your measure, the "big dig" tunnel in Boston shouldn't have been built. And we shouldn't dig more tunnels underneath the Hudson River.
My hazy understanding is that the Big Dig, despite the cost overruns, has been a big help to Boston, and that more Hudson river tunnels are badly needed. What do you think?
I'm guessing that you were exaggerating to make a point about $100k. When I was on my local school board, I found we couldn't build so much as a tool shed for $100k.

I was being generous. Chuck Marohn has mentioned doing 10k projects instead of my 100k.

it should probably follow a power law. For every $100k project there should be 10 $10k projects. And for every 100 $10k projects, there should thus be 10 $100k projects and 1 $1MM project.

Billion dollar projects would be rare.

Leave the mega-projects to the private sector. They will fail often too (their stats aren't any better), but at least, to quote Talib, they have skin in the game.

"I found we couldn't build so much as a tool shed for $100k."

That seems to be a problem with the system. You can buy get a 10'x14' metal shed at Lowes for $499.

Rob, I have a shed like that. It's not rugged enough for public use. I can barely use it myself.
The average double-wide mobile home is now $74,000, according to a brief Internet search. $10k buys you a residential roof repair.
Our school district once spent a couple million bucks on a school roof.
Commercial construction is expensive. That's just a fact.
We have a buch of bad laws governing public construction, and those laws do drive up costs while limiting the ability of managers to ensure that the project is done with high quality workmanship and/or on time. We also have a prevailing wage law, which leads to a whole new discussion.
Your proposed power law notwithstanding, do you think we should add a tunnel or two under the Hudson River? Canceling that project is widely regarded as one of the dumbest things former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did. The existing tunnels are used over capacity, and they will need to be shut down for major maintenance at some point.
The way I look at it is like so: Our ancestors paid up so we could have wonderful infrastructure -- roads, bridges, tunnels, schools, parks, etc. We are fiddling instead of paying it forward. I want to know what stuff we should or shouldn't build, and price alone isn't a satisfying answer. Function matters too.

"do you think we should add a tunnel or two under the Hudson River?"

We? I don't think it should be a federal issue, so as far as it effects me, no, "we" shouldnt.

Should New York State or New York City? I don't think it is proper for me to comment on that.

KY and my former city recently built 2 new bridges over the Ohio. I think we overbuilt by at least 1 bridge. I like the East End Bridge, if only because it connects I-265 on both sides of the river and that allows what I talked about earlier with the interstate being on the tangent to the city. If they would have moved I-64 to crossing that bridge and removed it from downtown like the 86-64 project suggested, that would have made it even better. And maybe one day they could have got I-65 out of downtown too.

I opposed the downtown bridge entirely, there was no need for it at all.

That's the wrong way to look at the "big dig." It may have improved things, but it was part two of a megaproject, running I-93 through the heart of a city, that should never have happened.

Good point, Andy. I am painfully aware of how urban freeways have ruined cities. (I frequently drive I-95 through Chester, PA, and it just makes me wince. I-676 through Philadelphia is another bad example.)
If we had _underground_ freeways in cities -- so they didn't cut the community in two -- would that be a good project? It would certainly be in the billions.
In 1978, then-Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo launched a $330 million, 1.7 mile railroad tunnel that connected two formerly dead-end commuter railroad stations. The project had been first proposed 20 years earlier. That tunnel was definitely an improvement. I don't know if it was worth the cost, but I don't ever hear of people saying it was a mistake to build it. Point being: if we're a wealthy country, we should use our wealth judiciously, to build lasting and helpful infrastructure improvements. Cost alone doesn't strike me as disqualifying.

Why build under when you can go around?

My current city, fortunately, had the good luck to be small enough to have our interstate go near town instead of through town. Unfortunately, one of the roads from the interstate exit to downtown has become a gawdawful stroad, but the other main exit has maintained being a road until it gets near downtown, and then it is mostly street like.

This should have been the model for all cities, build a loop road if you want, but the interstates should hit them on a tangent.

Exactly.

The central lesson for me (which I already knew): Nothing is too big to fail. Not a person, not a company, not a city, not an economy, not an empire. And not only that, we shouldn't throw good money after bad in trying to prevent the failure. I may be veering into hyper-schumpeter territory here, but the phoenix will arise from the ashes.

Lesson 2: why anti-fragility is important. Failures should have soft landings and a platform for new successes, not a scorched Earth.

These are really one and the same. I guess combining them: Let failure happen, the anti-fragile failures will just create a platform for moving forward, the fragile failures are a good riddance.

I am more bullish than ever. Our cities are in a virtuous cycle and are rapidly restoring themselves into coherent places and then going beyond what they ever were. Over the next decade, we’re going to see a huge acceleration in the building of dedicated bike & bus lanes 5-10 miles out of our city cores, and then we’ll electrify them. Our Clevelands will turn into better versions of Copenhagen. In our suburbia, some will see a continued coalescing into coherent small town communities, some will merge into the larger cities, and what’s left will equip itself for an electric car future or return to nature. Much like our ancestors reused old pavers to build their houses (and vice versa), we’re going to dismantle and upcycle much of our vast automobile infrastructure. We’ve got the tools to solve this fossil fuel dependency issue, and we will. Then we’ll move forward and begin sequestering carbon from atmosphere, cleaning our oceans, making our agriculture compact, sustainable, & ethical. In fact, my bigger worry is that we won’t leave the next generations meaningful work, but then again, they might be conquering the cosmos.

I'm bullish on urban centers, but not in that way at all. Some of our second and third tier cities are starting to see a J-curve of economic development, similar to Poland and other Eastern European countries; People that left eastern Pennsylvania for NYC (and helped drive housing costs way up throughout the boroughs) are now looking at Philadelphia as a cheaper alternative in the same way that many young Polish (...Latvian, etc.) migrants moved to London, Brussels, Paris, etc., but are now seeing a strong cost-benefit analysis to return closer to home in Warsaw, Krakow, Poznan, etc. after having accumulated skills. I know people from Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin that have moved from NYC and DC back to their home states, going to one of the major metro areas (not always one that is thriving). The current affordability crisis in the major cities is going to help revive the dynamism of our dormant metro areas.

But the idea that we'll become tech-enable eco-friendly utopias...that's a little further than I would dream up.

You’re describing me. I spent a decade in Boston & DC, before moving to the cheapskate urbanist promise land: Milwaukee, WI. So I agree with you. A down payment in DC is a walk-to-work high rise condo on Lake Michigan or a 22 minute bike ride from 3/2 bungalow in a fully-activated legacy streetcar neighborhood that looks & feels like Brookline (MA) or a Cleveland Park (DC), but with a lot more young scrappy entrepreneurs, a better arts & music scene, and a lot fewer neighbors criticizing the color of your shudders.

Re: technology. I’m actually pretty skeptical of most technology hype and tend to think our energy situation is much more dire than reported. However, protected bike lanes & dedicated transit lanes are mostly paint on pavement, but take political power (something that is moving to urban areas). Outside of those routes, things will necessarily coalesce into towns, move to more independent systems (more off-grid/local grid power, well water, septic, etc), or just decay/find new uses. It will probably just be natural selection –areas that have over extended with far flung public water & sewer systems will enter deeper decline than those that already have well & septic, etc.

I see the 'coalescing into towns' being far less inevitable and much longer term than our lifetimes. I would tend to agree with your analysis on a 100+-year timeframe, more or less. In an expansive metro area with a strong core economy, that process is likely to happen more rapidly, especially if functional transit exists/gets built. In areas that just sort of peter on with mediocre core output, expect to see what's happened over the decades in Chicago or Cincinnati where the suburbs just get less well maintained, but no major 'reshaping' happens. In areas where the core is dead, expect a circa 2000 Detroit 2.0.

Prototypical Milwaukee neighborhood - homes in 100s & 200s for reference.
https://www.google.com/maps...

Brookline: https://www.google.com/maps...

Cleveland Park:
https://www.google.com/maps...

IMO, it's hard to argue that Boston/DC are worth the incremental million dollars, unless there is a real reason one needs to be there (head surgeon at mass general or something..)

Michael I'm right there with you, super bullish on the future of American cities. Most people cannot see this vision, and that really holds them back from positive improvements.

Our future cities will be more convivial, safe, rich, and efficient than we could possibly dream. We don't even need to invent new technology, it's all right here for us. We just need to build it.

I'm not as enthusiastic as you both, but I agree completely that cities will be the places where solutions are found. Here's my take on some strong towns ideas: Money should be spent at the most local level reasonable. Money should also be spent only in the current period of human understanding, which I peg at 5 years at the long end. The people who pay taxes should be able to see and feel the benefits or failures of that money. If you spread spending out over generations, or distribute it over huge geographical areas our human minds simply lose focus. And if you can't measure costs and benefits, you can't make smart decisions.

If you think about it, cities largely have to operation within these principals: Their geography is defined and usually limited, and their ability to take on long-term financing is limited. Due to this they must be most fiscally responsive and, hopefully, responsible. The constraints of geography, time and finances keep cities in check and that will be their strength going forward.

You are living in the delusional word of secular religiosity of the New Urbanism.

Yup. Just look at the Mammoth Internal Improvement Act in Indiana in 1830s and things like Lucas Oil Stadium downtown and The Palladium here in the ‘burbs in Carmel.