Is your favourite road trying to make you poorer? The truth will SURPRISE you
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/heres-m...-you%E2%80%A8/
EXCERPT:
Quote:
If you drive a car in San Francisco and Oakland, you’re already aware of how much time you waste in traffic and how much you spend on gas. And you definitely know the rough road conditions leave something to be desired.
You likely don’t know 74 percent of the area’s roads are rated “poor,” and that driving on them costs you $1,044 a year in additional maintenance and fuel—more than in any major metropolitan area in the US.
That’s according to a report released this month by TRIP, a non-partisan, non-profit transportation research group based in Washington, D.C. Also in the “top” 10, rated by percent of major urban roads deemed poor, are Los Angeles (73), Concord, California (62), Detroit (56), San Jose (53), Cleveland (52), New York (51), San Diego (51), Grand Rapids (51), and Honolulu (51), each costing drivers between $500 and $1,000 a year.
As always, there are methodological issues with this kind of analysis, so you'll have to make your own assessment of the findings and adjust them to account for any major problems you discover. That being said, the basic premises--that there are very many road sin the US that are rated "poor" and that the poor state of those roads is likely to have a negative financial impact on their users--are, I think, reasonable.
If you agree with those premises, and if you feel you have a reasonable idea of how great the costs are, how do you believe the problem can be tackled?
