Can We Still Build Infrastructure?

The American notion of the open road is something we don't want to think about the details of.. we don't want to think about the real costs of it. We want to pretend that our gas taxes pay for our roads in full and that they should never have tolls on them and that raising the gas tax is unnecessary. But we haven't raised the gas tax since 1991 or 2 and it wasn't pegged to inflation or the price of gas, it was just a certain number of pennies per gallon. That money has become worth less even as the cost of construction has gone up and even as our roads are aging and the maintenance costs are going up so we're in a real pickle. The roads never paid for themselves really, because of the external costs, but we're in a position now where the notion that I can get in our car and drive wherever I want for free needs to go away...."

...I did get to interview the guy who was the head of Cintra operations in America, his name is Jose Maria Lopez Defuentes, and... he's coming from Europe, where there are tons of privatized toll roads, its normal there and nobody fights them. And he is trying to build them in Canada and the US, and I said "what were you surprised about as far as our culture and the way we see our infrastructure?', and he says: "You are all riding around, you're living in a house your grandparents built and you think it is free, but now the roof is leaking, and now you have to fix the floors and there's all this maintenance that you weren't really expecting.." and its a real culture shock. We're not in the frame of mind to build anything or even fix anything on a big scale...
-Matt Dellinger, on JH Kunstler's latest podcast

They are discussing Matt's new book, Interstate 69.