Overlaying an already properly designed road can be super cheap, but it requires the original road to have been properly designed. Whatever that cost might have been.
> The relevant number here is the cost to repave, not reconstruct, which is about $330,000-$350,000 per mile for a minor arterial road in a rural or urban area.
Sounds a tad more expensive than it needs to be. Skimming search results for my country (.fi), I get numbers ranging from 30 000 to 50 000 eur per kilometer. I know murican roads are wider, but I don't think they're that much wider. And I don't think we're particularly effective or cheap at doing it..
There's many things that are good things. However, you need to balance them against the cost (money, space, time, whatever) required to achieve them. For some smaller roads, the cost might not be worth the benefit.
So from your friend's driveway to 4 blocks of streets it only costs 25 times more ?
Taking into account that public roads are not just random cement but usually a special mix for durability, sound properties and water resistance, and then you have all the cables and tubes going under that might need to be taken care of when removing the current layer and putting back the new one. All of this has to be done on public property by qualified staff.
Overall a 25x increase in cost seems pretty fair from an external point of view.
Cool, now you just need to convince popular media to include narratives about better road design and use in a way that is subtle enough to avoid pushback but obvious enough to have the intended shaping effect. This sounds both incredibly difficult and incredibly expensive, but you say it's not, and we have no way to test which one of us is right. Agree to disagree. :)
Then multiple that by 20 (the lifetime of the road surface) and factor in that the resurfacing is significantly cheaper than the initial build and you quickly find roads are easily subsidized by property taxes.
Thereby doubling the cost next time repaving is needed. Oh well, just double the lanes each time the road wears out. In a few generations the problem will go away.
A few reflectors aren’t going to go over budget more than the crap they do. You can pork barrel it since it won’t be that much more. Roads are often updated if there’s any sort of traffic on it by design since construction is a racket.
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