Road infrastructure is significantly more expensive to build and maintain than other options.
Transit prevents wasteful spending.
Roads are expensive
Highways and roads are the fifth-highest expenditure of state governments, with 75% of funding coming locally. Pennsylvania’s road system is as large as New York, New Jersey, and all the New England States combined, and costs the commonwealth over $6.5 billion annually just to maintain. Transit, by contrast, gets only 1/3 as much funding, and bicyclists and pedestrians get 0.03% as much investment as do cars. Parking lots, alone, costs Pennsylvania $88.2 million every year.
Pennsylvania spends more per mile on roads than transit
According to the 2024-2025 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Executive Budget, highways and roads are more expensive per mile to both build and maintain than rail transit. Lets do some math:
$14.9 million per mile
From Pennsylvania’s own numbers, rail transit is at least 27% cheaper than car infrastructure. This makes intuitive sense, as highways are significantly larger than railroad tracks, and therefore take more space to build and maintain. Some highway interchanges are even the size of a whole city.
$ 1.39-3.02 million per mile (B3•B34 & C4•C34)*
$197 thousand per mile
$143 thousand per mile
*Pennsylvania is not currently building any new railroad tracks, and RTKL requests of SEPTA for the budget breakdown of the Wawa extension was denied due to no longer possessing the documents. Attempts at more realistic cost estimates are underway.
While driving may offer more flexibility, most everyone travels between cities, not Orivston to Ashland, and it makes no financial sense to build only the most expensive infrastructure for all possible trips. Building a more robust intercity transit system would save Pennsylvania’s tax money and create more jobs than doubling down on car dependency.
Urban sprawl is a Ponzi scheme
Auto-dependent land-use patterns, commonly called urban sprawl, can take many forms: single-family homes, large parking lots, single-use zoning, and even large swaths of nonfunctional grass between the road and building setbacks. Urban sprawl spreads out taxable users across wide areas. For the same tax revenue, a city must now build more miles of roads, plumbing, and transmission wires, effectively raising costs and diluting the tax base. To remain solvent, local governments allow developers to make new low-density housing tracts to infuse the city with a new tax base to pay for existing maintenance. This has been termed the Growth Ponzi Scheme, and has been understood for almost 15 years. At the extreme end, the sprawling, low-density town of Backus, Minnesota would have needed a tax rate of 99.8% to pay for a new wastewater system.
Learn more about how car-dependency is financially insolvent
Part 1 introduces the series and goes into the history of the Strong Towns Initiative.
YouTuber Jason Slaughter teamed up with the Strong Towns Initiative to describe how car-dependent infrastructure is fundamentally broken and fiscally harms cities and towns.
Part 3 describes the Growth Ponzi scheme and how suburban infrastructure cannot pay for its own upkeep.
Part 5 details the concept of Stroads, roads that are sprawling, expensive, and dangerous. A local example is Atherton Street in Ferguson Township and Boalsburg.
Part 6 describes how unsafe speeding should be prevented not with speed limits, but with road design.
Part 7 shows how car-dependent infrastructure is a net drain on city finances and is subsidized by denser, poorer neighborhoods.
This video from Strong Towns quickly summarizes the problems of suburbia and how you can start helping to fix the problem.
Part 8 covers the history and rise of car dependency on the intentional use of government subsidy.
This video details how to improve your community from the ground up with grassroots action and guerrilla urbanism.
Part 2 highlights the tax inefficiencies of single-use suburban infrastructure, and how they make cities poorer and less resilient.
Part 4 explains how low-density, car-dependent infrastructure can lead cities into bankruptcy.