For seventy years the country has poured its infrastructure budget into one bet: everyone drives, everywhere, for everything. The bill is now visible from anywhere.
- 2-6x
- What US transit lines cost per mile against peer countries
- 3.8M
- Homes short nationally, by conservative estimates
- 1/3
- Of the land in many US downtowns is parking
- 0
- Dedicated high-speed rail lines in service today
The stroad
A stroad tries to be a street and a road at once and fails at both. Five lanes, a center turn lane, strip malls behind parking lots, nothing reachable on foot. It moves traffic slowly and kills the land value around it.
Most American growth since 1950 has taken this shape, and that shape isn't a preference. It's the product of engineering standards, parking mandates, and zoning codes that make anything else illegal to build.
Cost disease
The United States pays several times what France, Spain, Japan, or Korea pay for a mile of transit, and takes longer to deliver it. The gap isn't geology or wages. It's process: layers of consultants, cost-plus contracts that reward overruns, and agencies that haven't built in a generation.
Every project is bespoke. Nothing is standardized, so nothing gets cheaper the second time. Peer countries treat rail as a repeatable product. America treats it as a one-off monument.
What sprawl costs
Sprawl shows up as a housing shortage in every city people want to live in, hours a day lost to driving, and household budgets where the car is the second largest expense.
The shortage is measured in millions of homes. The land to build them exists. It sits under parking lots and single-story strips next to the busiest corridors in the country.
