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Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
An anonymous reader writes: During a recent Urban Land Institute talk, the director of the Iowa Department of Transportation, Paul Trombino, told an audience that the road network in Iowa was probably going to "shrink." Calling for fewer highways isn't what you'd normally expect from a government transportation official, but since per capita driving has peaked in the U.S., it might make sense for states to question whether or not to spend their transportation budgets on new roads.
Thus begins the war on roads, think of the children!
It certainly doesn't make sense to plow money in to maintaining roads that are not being used. But there is also a cost with abandoning roads, so the overall benefit must be determined on a road by road basis. But that certainly is a departure from the general assumption that we must maintain all roads.
Do you shut down a road, or let it die a slow death?
I for one applaud this trailblazing official who is paving the way by providing a roadmap for other officials to follow while going down the road to more efficient government and leading the drive towards a more fiscally responsible America.
Now if only somone could give us a car analogy
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
They will come!
PER CAPITA driving in the US? And what exactly does that say or not say about total driving in Iowa? As long as the population keeps going up
(and it apparently is going up by about 0.5% a year in Iowa), we either will have to accept busier roads or build more of them. Slower growth sure.
That also doesn't mean we should spend less total given the horrible state of many roads in much of the US. BTW, I think that more money should be spent on mass transit in many places; but that doesn't mean I will sit still for bogus arguments.
Even if per capita driving has peaked, the population is increasing, so total driving is still increasing.
The article talks about how "per-capita driving has peaked," but that's not the whole issue. It makes sense to stop building roads when the total amount of driving has peaked. For that to happen, one of several scenarios needs to occur:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Glad to know a small agencies knows what is best for the market. Time for call to only produce small 4 cycl, efficiency and all that jazz
Back in the day the USA used to be a superpower. Nearly every community was linked by interurbans and railroads, many of which operated at higher speed than some of today's modern highways. Then the automobile came along, and people desired convenience. The automobile required billions and billions of square miles of pavement to be deployed everywhere. It was a huge economic boom, and created millions of jobs and businesses. The jobs required to upkeep all that pavement became a big part of the economy. Not to mention the secondary economies generated by automobile repair, insurance, etc. But now we are realizing how expensive all that pavement is. And it's a huuuuuuge chunk of our economy. The maintenance and upkeep budget is far higher than the budget for new infrastructure. Are cars really worth their huge hidden price tag? Convenience killed sustainability. But the railroads are dead, and it's too late to go back.
Where we're going, we don't need roads!
Happy 30th, Back to the Future!
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
Better in / out city transport system is still required.
Amtrack is appalling in terms of quality of service.
If we consider that the majority of driving is commuting to and from work. Then we factor in the current underemployment rate around 30%, real unemployment around 12%, and a labor participation rate are the lowest since the 1970s at around 70%. It should be obvious why places are not at "peak" road use.
In fact, if you look at their little map of "peak" and "growing" states, you'll see the states with greater economic growth/less unemployment are the ones that are growing above their "peak" road use.
So the idea is stupid. Road use will increase again when people start working again. It won't be until autonomous driving starts to drastically reduce the population that owns cars before you see significant decline in road use. Unless of course this official is hoping for continued poor economic conditions.
Rural roads will be abandoned...Rural land, especially family farms, will lose value...Family farms and rural housing will sell for much less due to poor access...Corporate entities buy the land and make a large farm or put up a factory..."This is good for Iowa. So, as the head of the Iowa Department of Transportation, I'll make sure these abandoned roads get as much money as possible to put them back up into working order." ---- Lets see the roads in question on a map, who owns the land next to them, and who made offers to buy the adjacent land before this announcement was made.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Specific areas that are experiencing population and/or economic growth will probably still need new roads, even if the rest of Iowa doesn't.
Washington State could use a few more roads... Or rather, we really need some more lanes on our jammed inner corridors, particularly around the I-5 and I-405 corridors in the greater Seattle area. Our WS-DOT is infatuated with massive projects that cost billions but won't substantially reduce congestion. They're putting an expensive new tolling system on 405's commuter lane that will dynamically increase tolls in response to increases traffic so that it stays clear for busses, and 3/4 of the revenue is going to a private company in another state. Of course, that's actually going to make the normal 405 traffic *worse*, because they're simply pushing the traffic into the normal lanes. And of course, the Seattle Convention Center was built over the main freeway (I-5), limiting future lane expansion. Hey, why would we ever need more than two lanes on the only freeway running through a major metropolis, right?
The article mentions Washington State without pointing out the current traffic problems. The traffic in the greater Seattle region is pretty horrible, and there are few practical options other than using a car to get from point to point for most people. The common refrain as to why we didn't build those lanes before is that "they'll just fill up as more people move in, so why bother?", or "You can't build your way out of congestion", with the apparent solution being that we're all supposed to live in downtown high-rises in some urban planning utopia. Well what do we say now? As it turns out, traffic apparently has a peak, because our population is peaking. Who'd have figured?
Do I sound bitter? I try not to be, because I love this area, but the leadership at DOT tends to grate on me at times when I'm stuck in a freeway-shaped parking lot, and I think about the years in Washington State when we actually had a budget surplus and didn't invest in our infrastructure at that time.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
According to TFA 'peak driving' happened in 2004. more than a decade later states are waking up to empty highways. I think this is happening for a few reasons:
intractable recession: The US, in general, is a declining superpower and its starting to show. our skin-and-bones transportation budget, crumbling bridges, and pothole ridden highways are so common as to be a feature. A decade of intentional federal gridlock by republicans clammouring for austerity measures in the face of a housing market crisis and educational loan crisis didnt help. and a decade prior our zeal to fight the war without end amen depleated a lot of our reserves from the clinton adminstration that could have been used to shore up what 60 years ago was a mark of american achievement...namely our highway infrastructure.
Driving sucks: Millenials like myself hate driving. car companies assumed it was their cars, and raced to put cellphones and wifi computers in our cars hoping we would buy them all up, only to realize we're crippled by inexorable college debt and newfound levels of unaffordable housing. regular maintenance and gas, insurance and most importantly our general penchant for unemployment after the housing decline means we arent really interested in a car. if we get one, it will be a beater from a used lot. we're also mostly service sector employees, or we work from home because OAP's and boomers turned our economy into a giant mechanical turk. Combine this with our urban brethren and we have everything from groceries to the latest blu-ray delivered to us through the mail. we dont shop strip malls, we just buy what you ask for off the list you make online.
Good people go to bed earlier.
In these flat agricultural states, a vast network of farm roads have been built over the years. The hallmark of over-roaded areas is the use of four-digit state route numbers in places that are mostly rural. Now that family farms are consolidating into large agribusiness operations, fewer access points are needed. Meanwhile, the cities need more roads and maintenance, so these states needed to reprioritize.
Uh rail roads are far from dead. In fact many rail roads are at capacity, or are running dangerously over capacity. The problem is they've torn up so many existing lines because they weren't needed at one point, now they're needed and they don't want to lay the track for it. You also seem to have forgotten that the points where rail can be laid as a distribution point have changed. Those years you're talking about are when rail or horse traffic were the only real ways to get around.
Om, nomnomnom...
I don't think this is the first time this kind of thing has happened, like so many things there is a cycle. In my own area I think that cycle last peaked in the 50s/60s, when they abandoned about a dozen hard to maintain bridges/roads. It definitely makes sense to abandon seldom used/hard to maintain roads so that the resources can be transferred to others. But as others have noted it is something that has to be done in a case by case basis, some roads may see little use but already have homes or properties which would be landlocked if the road was abandoned and hence cannot be abandoned. However in a state like Iowa there are probably a lot of cases where a farmer owns on both sides of a stretch of road and would love to be able to add a few acres of farmland by plowing up the road.
Licensing barriers: Nowadays, in many states, it takes 50 hours of driving on a learner's permit, supervised by a licensed driver 25 years of age or older. Indiana in the United States requires 50; some states in Australia require 120. With fewer people already driving, new drivers are finding it harder to find another suitable licensed driver with the time to supervise their driving. Some have resorted to paying $50 per hour for a driving instructor, and few recent graduates can afford $2,500 to $6,000 worth of lessons (source) on top of the price of a used car, fuel, and high-risk insurance for new drivers.
The cost is not zero.[...] You'll be flung off of your bike, and you'll end up face first on the crumbling remains of the sidewalk.[...]"
Which is different from falling off your bike while riding across a paddock how? That an ambulance chasing low-life law firm might want you to pursue damages? Pursue your imaginary claim if you like - but beware that Holdem, Scoldem and Buggerem don't take you to court in a class action case on behalf of rate/tax payers for damages due to unnecessary government expenditures. Or just have you declared a vexatious litigant.
You need to get some real exercise instead of lugging goal posts - the taxpayers have wasted too much money already paying damages for frivolous damages claims. No doubt you'd argue the case for laws against sharp corners on furniture and bad weather.
Pave baby, pave!
I'm a Californian. Nothing in this discussion makes any sense to me. The idea that you may not need more roads is... completely foreign. Do I need a visa to move to Iowa? It sounds great.
That per capita driving is going down doesn't mean that there are fewer cars on the roads, only that the rate of increase is smaller.
I doubt his comment can be taken at face value. This might be a ploy for more funding. Who knows, but I very highly doubt his statement was honest due to the number of very obvious issues.
About time.
Iowa has more roads than you would believe. Every mile on the mile except where pre-existing towns or rivers made it impossible there is a little gravel agricultural road.
This summary seems to link two ideas (the amount of highways and per capita driving). However, the forces that are driving per capita driving may not have much to do with the need for highways. Urbanization, aging population, and a declining labor force participation rate (linked to aging population) give some people less reason to drive within cities. We still need a system to move goods between cities. Highways actually make the most fiscal sense to accomplish this task.
You've mentioned that as if it's a problem
It is a problem for my cousin.
All that requirement means is that the parent of the new 16-year-old driver certifies that they've let the kid drive around for 50 hours with the parent in the car
That's a crime if the parent is also a non-driver, and it's easier said than done if the parent lacks the money to pay for the classroom portion of driver's ed or the time and money to take the child out for practice driving afterward. My cousin tells me his father lacks the time.
the easy solution to that is simply to get the damn thing at 16 instead of waiting for no reason!
So should parents be held responsible for driver's education of their children in the same way that they are held responsible for the child getting to school and back? For example, should it be considered neglect on the parent's part to either A. not hold a driver's license or B. not take the child out for practice driving?
You just have to be used to the Central Valley, without mountains within day-trip range, with incredible humidity in summer and cold, snowy winters.
I live in the Canadian prairies. Around here we have a whole grid of gravel roads (roughly every mile or so). These roads are not for providing access to homes, but rather for providing access to *fields*.
Back in the day farms were a lot smaller than they are now. Since then there has been a lot of consolidation, so they could probably remove a bunch of roads going in one direction (north/south or east/west) but they'd have to leave the roads going the other direction to continue to provide access to the fields.
Applying game theory to road networks, where drivers are local optimizing, but not necessarily reaching the global optimized network for traffic throughput, reducing the roads may actually increase efficiency of the Iowa road network. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27_paradox
If it's anything like around here, many of these roads could provide access to fields, not homes.
more than a decade later states are waking up to empty highways.
"Empty highways"? Even allowing that your statement includes hyperbole it doesn't fit with the fact that the US population is growing. Personally outside of some of the most rural parts of the US I've NEVER seen "empty highways". Most in fact seem to need more lanes than they have.
The US, in general, is a declining superpower and its starting to show.
Spare me. People have been spouting this nonsense as a political meme for most of my life. Every out of power politician declares that "we need to make america great again", thereby implying that somehow the country isn't great. They then follow it up by declaring the US to be "the greatest country in the world". So which is it? The US has the largest economy, the largest military, leads the world in scientific research, and does so with just 5% of the world's population. Declining? I've been around for a half century and can't say I see the evidence. Things are better in the US than when I was born. Just because some other countries have been doing well (China etc) doesn't mean things are going in the shitter here.
our skin-and-bones transportation budget, crumbling bridges, and pothole ridden highways are so common as to be a feature.
Any shortfalls can be solved overnight by simply reallocating some of the ludicrous amount of money we spend on our military to domestic infrastructure. More money could be saved by going to a single payer health care system like most of the rest of the civilized world. We have the money but our leaders have chosen to spend it poorly. We like to pretend we need to spend more on our military than the next 17 largest countries combined. We like to pretend that socialized medicine is somehow evil when in fact avoiding it is the unethical thing to do. Not to mention that we already have it (Medicare) and are in denial about it.
Millenials like myself hate driving.
Better get over that. Not being snarky, it's just a reality of living in most parts of the US. Most of the country is simply not accessible without a car and that isn't going to change anytime soon. You don't have to love to drive but it's going to be a part of your life most likely whether you like it or not.
we're crippled by inexorable college debt and newfound levels of unaffordable housing. regular maintenance and gas, insurance and most importantly our general penchant for unemployment after the housing decline means we arent really interested in a car.
That sounds like a lot of excuses to me. Adjusted for inflation gas is cheaper now than it was when I was a child. You can avoid a lot of college debt by not going to expensive private colleges you cannot afford. Spend a year or two at a community college and finish up at your state college. You can get a great education and not be in the poor house. Insurance? You can be covered by your parents until you are 26. If you can't get a job by then with unemployment at 5% then you probably are doing something wrong.
Other generations have had it harder than you. Would you have preferred to grow up during the Great Depression or WWII? How about as a minority 50 or even 25 years ago? I assure you things were harder then.
I'm not a millennial, but I've definitely seen their struggle. I can attest that they have to work twice as hard for half what their parents had. I look at all the opportunities to prove myself I was given as a borderline gen-x before 9/11 and the financial crash and there's not a snowballs chance anyone would get that today.
Along with going around apologizing for other people's actions of decades or centuries ago, a.k.a. self-aggrandizement by convicting dead people in absentia of questionable crimes, with latent implications of lack of self-worth.
I'm up in the Canadian prairies...farming country. We've got a 1-mile grid road system here too, and we could probably get rid of some of them as well.
I've lived in Iowa all my life. I've lived in Northwest, Northeast and Southeast. I've traveled across the state many times and I can tell you- there is not an "excess" of highways. There is really only two major roads going East-West I-80 and US-HWY 20 and two North-South I-35 and I-380. That is it.. One of them isn't even classified as an interstate but at least it is 2-lane and 65 MPH. If your going anywhere in the state you pretty much take a county highway to get onto one of those four roads and then travel the majority of your journey on those roads. I am going to assume they are thinking about all of these local county highways. Let me tell you, once you get out of a city, off one of those 4 major roads I listed there is only county highways left. This is how you get to all those those shrinking towns Iowa is dotted with. You get off those and you are putting some gravel in your travel.
If the data doesn't include the past two years or so, then yes but only because the price of gasoline was artificially high. Now that it's come back down out of the clouds, people are driving more. Furthermore, you have to call into question the opinion of anyone who lives in a major city who has never lived in a rural area particularly people living on the East Coast. Those folks can't really comprehend long distance driving and how necessary it is.
Just drove from Missouri Valley, IA to Denison, IA on Hwy 30 the other day. Other than a few stretches of cement roads, the rest is horrible old potholed blacktop. Fix that shit you lazy bastards.
I am sure they could just enact some civil immunity law if there isnt one already. A friend of mine got t-boned by a school bus (no children aboard at the time) making an illegal left turn. Even though the police at the scene ruled the accident to be entirely the fault of the bus driver there was nothing she could do. Her insurance company had to pay the entire claim and she was suck with the deductible. Could not sue for any damages etc.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"since per capita driving has peaked in the U.S.,"
As the population gets older, there will be more driving going on - not less.
There may be a peak but I don't see when that would be.
That's a huge assumption to make with no backup.
That said, for Iowa it may well make sense to reduce the number of roads, perhaps expanding some others...
Just on a side note, no-one really thinks about Iowa but I had the please of driving through a few years ago and it's one of the more beautiful states to drive through.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Every dollar spent on new roads is a commitment -- to some degree -- to keep spending money to maintain those roads. There comes a point where you have to choose between spending all your tax money on maintaining the infrastructure you've already built, or abandoning some of that infrastructure in place so that you can do other things with that tax money.
We've seen the results in many places (Detroit, NYC, etc) of politicians choosing to abandon infrastructure so they can spend tax dollars on some other pork project (including new roads and bridges to nowhere). So good for Iowa.
It's really the same for public transport, which is also not cost effective. I really don't get the argument that public transport is bad because it's not cost effective. The roads aren't either. Both are a public service.
I am sure they could just enact some civil immunity law if there isnt one already. A friend of mine got t-boned by a school bus (no children aboard at the time) making an illegal left turn. Even though the police at the scene ruled the accident to be entirely the fault of the bus driver there was nothing she could do. Her insurance company had to pay the entire claim and she was stuck with the deductible. Could not sue for any damages etc.
Ouch!. My instinct would be to blame the insurance company - at the very least they may not have provided a product fit for intended use (but I'm not particularly litigious or a lawyer).
I guess that's a big part of the issue - the party that makes the decisions on when roads are unsustainable to maintain is the same party that passes the laws.
The same as the USA, Australia has many old mining towns that are now abandoned (and a currently contentious one where a town build for asbestos mining is forcibly being closed and some residents refuse to leave). Since it's not economically feasible to maintain the roads or the towns, they're either closed off (costs a sign and a little work with a bulldozer to dig a trench and make a barrier mound with the spoils). The closure probably falls under the last costs for maintenance. I'm pretty sure some of the covered bridges in Southern USA come under the same category. Sure there may be costs born by the taxpayer when people hurt themselves using them - as there is when they have accidents on their own property which the government is not obligated to provide maintenance.
We have a ridiculous situation where playgrounds are downgraded because of the insurance costs due to damages claims by people who hurt themselves on swings and slides - which is an area where maybe the government should pass immunity laws. In the end I suspect it's a simple issue of costs - taxpayers often have bigger mouths than wallets, and payout decisions made by juries don't help things.
When the revolution comes we're gonna need a longer wall for the lawyers.
Something similar happened to my dad. Not a school bus, but a city vehicle who ran a stop sign. Cost the insurance over 5k to get it fixed, the city paid nothing. They didn't have to carry any insurance at all; must be nice to be above the law like that.
somebody is spending too much time after work shouting YOU SHALL NOT PASS !! it's starting to carry over into their real life.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Just evaluate which roads you need and maintain them. Does everything have to be political?
>> per capita driving has peaked in the U.S
citation please. ..and anyway even if per-capita driving ratio has peaked, the number of 'capitas' is still growing i.e. the US population is still growing, (atlhough admittedly not by much) and the average age of cars on the road is rising, so the net result is we're still seeing an increasing number of cars on the road year-on-year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The problem isn't that they don't want to lay the tracks, the problem is the economics. Today it costs $US1-2 million dollars to lay one mile of track. It takes one hell of a return of investment to get that money back after fixed expenses like employees, maintenance of rolling stock and right of way, financial obligations, etc. When the majority of railroads were built shortly after the Civil War, they relied on plentiful cheap immigrant labor for track laying work. Back then unions didn't exist, there was no such thing as minimum wage or income tax, and cost of living was very low. After WWI, few new railroad grades were built.
The merger fever starting in the 1960s saw much redundant trackage eliminated in the last sixty years. But they were intentionally picked clean to eliminate competition, knowing full well that cost to restore trackage would be a detriment. The abandoned right-of-ways and structures were also a property tax obligation that they wanted to unload quickly. Former good grades that were excellent routes were decimated wherever possible - many became farmlands, targets of urban development, and highway grades.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I'm born and raised in Missouri, despite working in the metro DC area and living in Maryland.
The difference I'm referring to has more to do with the overall size of the state, vs. how significant and crowded the cities are within it.
In Missouri, for example, you can clearly see that the roads and highways are congested in St. Louis, or in Kansas City ... yet even in those two cities, traffic never really rises to the level of the metro DC area. Meanwhile, you've got hundreds of miles of wide open space. In Maryland, sure -- you've got less congested places. But there's also much more of a situation where people do long commutes to and from those places to the congested parts, each day, for a career job that justifies the travel. In Missouri, you really just don't have people living out in central or southern MO who drive all the way in to St. Louis for a job. (Maybe a FEW exceptions, but typically no....)
For example, I live in a small town right by the borders of Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland - yet I go to work in DC. Other people take the train in to work each day who live out in Martinsburg or Charles Town, WV. There's a pretty big difference in salary and availability of jobs in the metro DC area vs. all these other outlying areas that causes such a thing to make sense. That's not typical in the Midwest.
What's the point of all these small worthless towns full of the exact same chain stores and restaurants?
The year being 2015, some boffin in a flying DeLorean converted to Mr. Fusion just had to say it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've been saying for years that several states should start abandoning some roads. Stop maintenance on them. Allow them to be reclaimed by nature, and used freely by the locals.
Less roads means less upkeep cost, and means more land that can be put to use by the locals and may even result in more tax dollars.
So why didn't your uncle simply get his driver's license back when he was 16?
In my particular case, my uncle drives. He just doesn't have much time to take his son driving on the roughly one day per fortnight that they are together.
They should have solved the problem in the previous generation!
In any case, why must the opportunity to obtain a driver's license be hereditary? If this trend continues, and the number of active drivers actually does shrink from one generation to the next, what you call "the tiny number of people who are affected by it" will become a substantial number of people. I ask at this early stage in order to prevent it from becoming a big problem.
It's not as if these requirements are new, after all.
The 50-hour requirement was not in place in Indiana a generation ago.
Furthermore, I suspect that in the vast majority of cases where the parent lacks a license, it's because the family lives somewhere like Manhattan where the child doesn't actually need one either.
Why should the fact that the parents lived in Manhattan or had a seizure disorder doom the child to also having to live in Manhattan?
What about your aunt; can't he drive with her?
She told me that his completing the required supervised practice driving with her, even after he completes a few hours with a licensed instructor, "would make [her] a nervous wreck."
What about your cousin's uncle (i.e., your dad)?
My father lives two states away.
What about a random neighbor, who is not an "instructor" and therefore probably would charge much less than $50/hour?
I've considered this. How would one go about safely finding a suitable random neighbor, especially while living in not the nicest part of town? Is there an app for finding licensed drivers within cycling distance who are willing to supervise driving practice?
What about you?
I currently don't own a car, instead relying on a bicycle.
They JUST signed a new law boosting the gas tax here in Iowa $.10 a gallon. Guess they'll need to lower that to take care of fewer roads.
Who am I kidding?
We've been cutting taxes on the 1% while cutting wages for the only folks left to tax for 40 years. We're running out of money. Not because it isn't there but because we can't seem to give it to the rich fast enough.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That only counts if they're not using deceptive and immoral tricks to bring in more cash. There's two really nasty things the investor class is doing that invalidates your argument.
First, they pump, dump and then get bailed out as too big to fail. They've been doing this for at least a hundred years, maybe longer. Please read this and maybe even the book it references.
Then there's the more recent phenomenon called getting "Bained". Remember Kay-B-Toys? Mervyns? They weren't failed companies. They were doing just fine. They got bought out by venture capitalists who used their good name & credit to borrow a tonne of money, pay themselves huge bonuses, and then shut the whole thing down. Ever wonder what happened to all those cool Sci-Fi anthologies from the 70s? Issac Asimov's Stories and what not. Folks didn't stop reading them, their distributor was sitting on a mountain of valuable property they weren't keeping track of. Some wealthy asshat noticed, bought them up and liquidated them. Suddenly no distributor and being small but successful they collapsed before they could get another one.
So even if I ignore the fact that just about every rich person relied on the gov't directly to make their fortune, even if I ignore the fact that they're wealth is largely build on the infrastructure and education system of our civilization, even if I ignore the commons and the meaning of natural resources. Even if I ignore _all_ that, you're still left with a bunch of dirty thieves who couldn't survive in the imaginary "real" world of capitalism that's never existed anyway.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The problem is they've torn up so many existing lines because they weren't needed at one point, now they're needed and they don't want to lay the track for it.
The problem is nobody trains for this [no pun intended]. So the cost of laying or repairing tracks is X but the slope of the demand curve is such that only a 10% increase in construction puts the cost at 10*X.
This is like basically every industry, and it's the cost of being "lean". When you don't do your own training, education and skill building, you can only make use of the skills that are already out there in the market place.
It's great for the skilled workers willing to put up the capital for the certifications, tools and equipment to carry out the work and set themselves up as contractors. It's not so great for the infrastructure that is limited by the lack of supply. I guess it must be ok for the corporates that shell out for the contractors, because if it wasn't, they'd change up their game and train workers internally.
To quote that great civil servant, the Transit advisor from SimCity 2000: