We've built a lot of road structures in this country. Older ones are falling apart, new ones will fall apart. This is not a post about the evils of highway expenditures, I'm just pointing out that the shiny new roadway of today is the crumbling structure much in need of maintenance thirty years from now. Infrastructure is expensive to build, and also very expensive to maintain. It's always tempting to defer maintenance, passing the buck on down the road often at huge (later) cost.
It's also of course true of transit systems. The capital expenditures of my local transit authority are largely dedicated towards much-delayed station refurbishing and similar.
