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Some right wing shithole states don't have paved roads. Ever been to Mississippi or anywhere in Texas outside of a city?


Red State Building Blues

Excessive infrastructure costs plague freeway construction in conservative areas

High infrastructure construction costs in many American cities, which have
made headlines for several years, are now being formally studied by a team
of New York University researchers. Since much of the work so far has
examined rail infrastructure in dense cities such as New York and Boston,
some Americans may be tempted to write off the issue as simply another
example of blue-state corruption. But a look at some recent freeway
projects in conservative states with a reputation for low costs and
generally good governance suggests that infrastructure cost problems in
the United States may be far more widespread.

Any analysis should first establish a baseline of typical freeway costs in continental Europe. A contributor to the forum skyscrapercity.com has made
a large compilation of recently completed or planned projects. My own
attempts to find costs for some of the larger projects on this list,
though admittedly unsystematic, suggest that in Europe, a new four-lane expressway in an undeveloped area without unusual terrain difficulties
should cost about $10 million to $20 million per mile in round numbers,
with some outliers on the high end.

Let’s start by looking at Spain, a nation with some of the world’s lowest infrastructure costs. A news report from the province of Castilla y León
in 2021 reported on several projects in progress. Among the largest: a new four-lane freeway segment parallel to an existing road between the towns
of Santiuste and Venta Nueva, already 77 percent completed, was estimated
to cost 86.7 million euros for 16.2 kilometers—roughly $9.3 million per
mile, using a euro-to-dollar conversion rate of 1.1. Another completed
project in the same region, between the towns San Esteban de Gormaz and
Langa de Duero, cost 66.96 million euros for 12.8 kilometers, or about
$9.1 million per mile.

Similar price tags are seen in other European countries with cheap infrastructure, such as Scandinavia. One of the largest recently finished freeway projects in Sweden, for instance, is a segment of Riksväg 40, a
road connecting the cities of Gothenburg and Jönköping that is gradually
being upgraded to a four-lane freeway. Seventeen kilometers of this
upgraded road, through hilly terrain near the town of Ulricehamn, opened
in 2015. Veidekke, the contractor for the most complex seven-kilometer subsegment of this road—including six bridges and a quarter-mile twin-bore tunnel—claims that this subsegment cost 570 million Swedish kronor, or
roughly $13 million per mile. In Denmark, the Holstebromotorvej, a 39- kilometer freeway between the small cities of Herning and Holstebro, was completed in 2018 for 2.85 billion Danish kroner, a quarter less than the originally projected price and about $17 million per mile. In Norway, a four-lane freeway running 23 kilometers between the towns of Tvedestrand
and Arendal on the nation’s southeast coast opened in 2019. The project includes 27 bridges, four short tunnels, and extensive cuttings through
rocky terrain, and cost just over 3 billion Norwegian kroner, or about $22 million per mile—quite a low price considering the geological challenges
and Norway’s high labor costs.

European countries with more expensive rail infrastructure, such as
Germany and the Netherlands, tend to have similar or somewhat higher
freeway costs. In Germany, a recent 14-kilometer expressway segment
through the hills of the Rhineland–Palatinate, opened in 2019, cost only
112 million euros—about $14 million per mile. A large expansion of Bundesautobahn 14, with several segments already completed, will cost a
planned 1.7 billion euros for 155 kilometers, or about $19 million per
mile. (To be fair, Germany does have more expensive projects, such as a
short urban bypass in the northern part of the country that cost 231.7
million euros for 9.5 kilometers, or $42 million per mile—though this
expense may owe to the freeway’s proximity to a dense urban area,
requiring many overpasses and extensive noise mitigation.) The most
expensive large European project that does not involve considerable
tunneling or pass through a dense city may be the Buitenring Parkstad
Limburg in the Netherlands: a 26-kilometer beltway around a dense urban agglomeration that had a final bill of 446 million euros, or about $30
million per mile. This sum was enough to provoke a substantial scandal, as
it more than tripled the original budget.

Many routine freeway projects in the U.S., in states with low labor costs
and reputations for good governance, have far exceeded these European
projects for no apparent reason. Consider an in-progress segment of
Interstate 69 in Indiana, running from the Indianapolis beltway to the
town of Martinsville 26 miles to the southwest. In 2018, the expenditure
for the project was estimated at $1.6 billion, or about $62 million per mile—far above any European project that I know of that does not run
through a dense city or require tunneling. Unlike the European projects discussed in this essay, moreover, I-69 is not actually a new road. It is
an upgrade of the existing State Route 37, already a four-lane divided
highway, to eliminate some at-grade intersections, widen shoulders, and otherwise improve the road to Interstate design standards—significantly
less work than a new freeway would be.

Why should this project require three times as much money as wholly new European freeways? One partial excuse might be the larger number of road crossings on the project—one source claims that it will involve
reconstruction of 35 overpasses and construction of 39 new ones. But
overpasses are not expensive enough to account fully for the difference.
The Federal Highway Administration reports that outside a few especially expensive regions such as the Northeast, bridges over freeways cost (in
round numbers) roughly between $100 and $250 per square foot in the United States—meaning that a 20-foot-wide bridge over a 200-foot-wide freeway
could be expected to require about $1 million in spending.

Another example, in the Midwest: the Wisconsin DOT recently widened a 45-
mile segment of Interstate 39/90 from Madison to the border with Illinois, adding an additional lane in each direction and reconfiguring a few interchanges. According to an estimate made in 2018 when the work was well underway and a projected three years from completion, the project was
estimated at $1.2 billion—roughly $27 million per mile. A more recent
official report from shortly before completion gave the cost as $1.17
billion. This cost per mile would pay for an uncommonly expensive new
freeway in Europe, and merely adding a lane to an existing freeway should
be a much easier project than building a new freeway from scratch.

Finally, let’s consider two projects in Texas, the exemplar of car-loving
red states. The Grand Parkway is a nearly complete third ring road for the Houston metropolitan area. The last segments still under construction lie
to the east of the city and traverse flat, generally undeveloped
territory. A fact sheet from mid-2020, when these final segments were approximately half-finished, estimated a cost of $1.26 billion for new construction or upgrades on a total of 43.6 miles of roadway (not counting
the cost of tolling facilities), plus upgrades to the tolling
infrastructure on a shorter segment of preexisting road. This is a cost of $28.9 million per mile, which would again be quite high for a new four-
lane freeway in Europe. But the 43.6 miles of new Grand Parkway
construction comprise 37.5 miles of new road that is mostly two lanes,
with a few short four-lane sections to allow passing; and 6.1 miles of
adding four new toll lanes to an existing road.

In San Antonio, meanwhile, the Texas Department of Transportation is
widening Loop 1604, one of the city’s ring roads. A seemingly out-of-date
page on TxDOT’s website lists one segment already let out to contract,
with an estimated cost of $148 million for five miles, or about $30
million per mile—again, significantly above European norms for newly built freeways and almost on par with boondoggles such as the Buitenring
Parkstad Limburg, for a project that is not a newly built freeway. The improvements to Loop 1604 principally involve reconfigurations of service
roads and the addition of three new lanes in each direction, with little additional landscaping or environmental mitigation required: the segment includes only six crossings of surface roads or other paths, and TxDOT
notes that “all improvements are located within the existing right of way
and easements.” The next road-widening segment has a budget of $234
million for 7.8 miles—again, $30 million per mile.

Uncovering the causes of these differences would be well worth a research project undertaken by one or more state DOTs. They should itemize in as
much detail as possible the costs of several typical recent freeway
projects in the United States and request similar data from peer agencies
in Europe for comparison. Any inefficiencies in American practices likely
also exist in other aspects of civil infrastructure, not just freeway construction.

One common complaint among American public-transit advocates is that U.S. infrastructure planners talk to and learn only from one another, or at
best from other English-speaking nations with many of the same
problems—meaning that obsolete or inefficient methods get established as
best practices. My investigations suggest that even far more routine infrastructure upgrades such as road widenings suffer from the same
problems. Any state transportation planner willing to go against the grain
and find ways to learn from foreign experiences could likely save
taxpayers billions of dollars.

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