Cost of Infrastructure

A new sidewalk in Philadelphia which is intended to beautify a commercial corridor and thus help the businesses within it attract more customers can cost over a million dollars or about $15,000 per business the sidewalk is intended to help. Pedestrian Street Lights also cost about $15,000 per business. Meanwhile these same businesses are struggling to get loans in order to expand, their facades are a wreck, and many of the buildings along the street remain empty.

The amount spent on these beautification projects would have been enough to send the business owners to a community college, to help small manufacturing plants secure equipment so the community could start exporting again, to fix the facades of every business on the corridor, or to do any number of other things.

This is not to say that infrastructure projects aren't ever cost effective, sometimes they are worth a lot. In the same place as the sidewalks were beautified internet was unreliable and slow, underground fires stopped traffic and bursting water pipes flooded the streets and businesses above. A little ways away holes were appearing in sidewalks which weren't repaired, holes which dropped ten or more feet down into the drainage system. Fixing the IT infrastructure, the failing water pipes, and the holes in the sidewalk may also have been very helpful. None of these were done however.

My points are these;

1-Greater care needs to be taken when selecting projects.
2-Not all governmental projects need to be infrastructure projects which a few create temporary jobs with some of the money and use the rest to import materials manufactured in outside economies.

When planning infrastructure things need to be put into perspective. For example the cost of a light rail project might be enough to build apartments for every person who would have taken the rail so that they would be closer to work for example. While there are many reasons not to do this such a perspective allows us to way not only the benefits and costs but to try to think of other ways to approach a problem.