Road maintenance should be prioritized over new construction for reasons spanning economics, safety, employment, and long-term fiscal sustainability. The evidence is compelling: maintaining existing infrastructure yields superior returns across nearly every metric that policymakers and taxpayers should care about.
The Exponential Cost of Neglect
The fundamental economics are stark. When road defects are repaired promptly, costs remain modest. When defects are neglected, the entire road section may fail completely, requiring full reconstruction at three to six times the cost of maintenance. This isn’t merely a linear relationship—deferred maintenance compounds annually at approximately 7 percent, meaning the longer governments delay repairs, the exponentially higher the eventual bill becomes. Research from the U.S. General Services Administration documents that every dollar of deferred maintenance can result in four dollars of capital renewal needs in the future. In the most dramatic cases, delaying maintenance can increase future costs by as much as 600 percent.
The United States presently faces a $1 trillion backlog of roads and bridges requiring repair. Yet approximately $27 billion annually—roughly 25 percent of total highway spending—continues to flow toward expanding and building new roads rather than addressing existing deterioration. This allocation pattern creates a vicious cycle: insufficient maintenance budgets force postponement of necessary repairs, deterioration accelerates, and the backlog grows larger and more expensive to address. States collectively face an annual shortfall of at least $8.6 billion for road and bridge maintenance, while the total deferred maintenance gap across all U.S. infrastructure is estimated at $1 trillion, with a $3.7 trillion investment gap over the next decade at current funding levels.
Economic Returns: Maintenance Outperforms Expansion
Recent research directly challenges the conventional wisdom that new highway construction drives economic growth. A comprehensive study published in the Journal of the American Planning Association found that in urban areas, the costs of expanding roads are three times greater than the benefits. When analysts account for direct government spending alone, costs exceeded benefits by 17 percent. The U.S. urban roadway system is effectively overbuilt; expansion is unlikely to yield the economic benefits policymakers hope for.
The land use dimension compounds this problem. Roadways account for one-fifth to one-quarter of all urbanized land in the United States, valued at approximately $5.4 trillion in today’s dollars. Research suggests that reducing roadway area by just 10 percent would yield a net economic benefit of nearly $28 billion annually—resources that could be redirected toward productive uses like housing, commerce, and public space.
In contrast, maintenance and rehabilitation projects demonstrate superior return on investment. Every dollar spent on highway resurfacing and rehabilitation creates more jobs than new highway construction: $1 billion in resurfacing projects generates 10,421 job-years of work compared to 9,316 job-years for new construction. Rehabilitation projects overall produce 16 percent more jobs per dollar than new roads. This employment advantage exists because maintenance work requires less land acquisition cost (approximately 10 percent of new construction expenses) and can be executed with existing crews and infrastructure.
Safety Consequences of Poor Road Conditions
The relationship between pavement condition and traffic safety is direct and measurable. Roads in very poor condition exhibit crash rates more than double those of roads in good condition. A one standard deviation increase in road roughness (measured by the International Roughness Index) causes an 11 percent decrease in average vehicle speed and a crash frequency increase large enough to move a safe road segment with no crashes to approximately 0.5 standard deviations above the average crash rate. This relationship is particularly pronounced on medium-speed urban and rural collector roads, where poor pavement conditions disproportionately affect same-direction crashes and multi-vehicle incidents.
Research from Iowa transportation data revealed that well-maintained roads with improved friction scores correlate with lower crash rates, while rougher roads and adverse conditions are linked to higher crash severity. The practical implication is clear: every year of postponed maintenance maintenance increases accident risk for millions of drivers and deteriorates road network safety.
Employment and Economic Multiplier Benefits
Transportation infrastructure investments generate substantial multiplier effects throughout the broader economy. Federal spending on highway and bridge improvements creates indirect and induced jobs equal to roughly double the direct employment created—a multiplier of approximately 2.0. For every job directly created through infrastructure investment, another job materializes elsewhere in the economy through secondary spending and supply chain effects.
The macroeconomic impact extends beyond employment. Highway infrastructure investment generates a GDP multiplier of approximately 3.6 times the direct spending over a five-year period. This means that every dollar invested in highways multiplies into $3.60 of cumulative gross domestic product growth. The average household receives approximately $232 in additional disposable income annually from highway investment, the productivity index increases by 0.04 percent, and industrial production increases by 0.2 percent.
Critically, these multiplier effects are even stronger in regions with higher population density and existing infrastructure. Dense metro areas saw 11 percent wage growth for construction jobs between 2012 and 2020, compared to just 5 percent in less dense cities. Construction employment grew 57 percent in denser regions versus 37 percent elsewhere during this period. This pattern suggests that concentrating maintenance spending in already-developed areas creates more robust local economies, stronger unions, more accessible job markets, and reinforces communities through reinvestment in existing infrastructure.
The Case for Preventive Maintenance Economics
The choice between proactive maintenance and reactive reconstruction represents a fundamental difference in long-term financial outcomes. Proactive maintenance strategies allow governments to:
Extend Asset Life: Well-maintained roads last decades longer than neglected ones, delaying the need for expensive reconstruction and spreading costs across multiple budget cycles rather than concentrating them in single, massive expenditures.
Enable Predictable Budgeting: Scheduled maintenance can be planned years in advance, allowing communities to align spending with other priorities and plan capital budgets with certainty rather than responding to crises and emergencies.
Reduce User Costs: Proper pavement condition reduces vehicle operating costs through lower fuel consumption, decreased tire wear, reduced brake stress, and faster journey times. A decrease in roughness of just 1 meter per kilometer results in one percent reduction in tire wear for passenger cars, potentially saving $321 million annually across a nation’s highway system.
Minimize Externalities: Poor road conditions increase environmental damage through greater fuel consumption, increased emissions from slower, stop-and-go traffic, and higher accident rates with associated environmental and health costs.
Catastrophic Failure Case Study: The I-35W Bridge Collapse
The August 1, 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis provides stark evidence of deferred maintenance consequences. Originally constructed in 1964 at a cost of $5.2 million to carry 140,000 vehicles daily, the bridge failed due to a design error in gusset plate dimensions that was never corrected through maintenance and inspections.
The immediate costs were devastating: 13 deaths, 145 injuries, and approximately $234 million in reconstruction expenses. But the economic damage extended far beyond the bridge itself. Detours cost the region approximately $400,000 daily, totaling roughly $120 million over the 60-week reconstruction period. Regional economic output declined by an estimated 0.01 percent annually, translating to approximately $60 million in lost economic activity until replacement. Traffic management costs reached $7 million, cleanup costs $8 million, and additional vehicle emissions added $25 million in environmental costs. The combined direct and indirect costs approached $600 million—more than 100 times the original construction cost.
The I-35W collapse forced acceleration of rehabilitation efforts for similar structures across the United States, diverting resources from other transportation safety measures and highlighting the cascading costs of infrastructure neglect. Moreover, the ripple effects extended beyond Minneapolis: the Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in 2024 caused approximately $15 million in daily losses during an 11-week port closure, demonstrating that single infrastructure failures can trigger system-wide economic shocks affecting multiple sectors.
The Funding Allocation Problem
The fundamental problem is not insufficient total spending on roads—it is misallocation of available funds. While road maintenance typically accounts for 30 to 60 percent of total road expenditures in developed economies, many countries and agencies continue to favor new construction and reconstruction over preventive maintenance. This preference persists despite mounting evidence that it maximizes long-term costs.
States vary considerably in their maintenance funding approaches. Some rely on general funds, others on bonds, and a few on special revenue sources. However, actual appropriations have consistently fallen far short of identified needs. For example, Alaska reported $2.1 billion in deferred infrastructure maintenance as of 2023, yet annual appropriations covered only approximately 1.5 percent of total deferred maintenance needs in recent years. This pattern repeats nationwide: identified needs are substantial, but funding remains inadequate—yet the same governments continue allocating resources to expansion rather than addressing the backlog.
Strategic Reorientation Required
The solution is not more funding alone, but reallocation of existing resources toward maintenance before expansion. Federal dollars should not fund new roads and bridges when existing infrastructure remains at risk of breakdown. This represents a complete reorientation of transportation programming away from growth-focused expansion toward maintenance-first asset management.
Implementing this transition requires:
Quantified Maintenance Backlogs: States must develop clear definitions of deferred maintenance, establish thresholds for reporting, and measure accumulated maintenance needs systematically. Only six states currently disclose total estimated deferred maintenance costs across multiple asset classes.
Prioritization Frameworks: States should establish transparent criteria for which deferred maintenance projects receive priority based on criticality to transportation network function, vulnerability to climate events, and consequences of failure.
Long-Term Planning: Transportation agencies must develop multiyear maintenance plans with dedicated funding streams, allowing projects to be scheduled efficiently and budgets to be predictable.
Performance Metrics: Success should be measured not by miles of new road constructed but by network-wide pavement condition, bridge sufficiency, safety metrics, and cost per unit of service delivered.
Road maintenance is more important than new construction because it delivers superior returns across every meaningful metric: lower lifecycle costs, higher employment per dollar invested, better safety outcomes, more robust economic multiplier effects, and more equitable distribution of benefits across communities. The $1 trillion deferred maintenance backlog and exponential cost growth from neglect create an urgent fiscal case for prioritization. Meanwhile, research consistently demonstrates that road expansion in already-developed areas generates costs exceeding benefits by substantial margins.
The choice between maintenance and expansion is fundamentally a choice between long-term sustainability and short-term political expediency. Maintenance preserves assets, extends their productive life, and generates reliable economic returns. Expansion consumes land, creates new perpetual maintenance obligations, and yields diminishing economic benefits in already-developed regions. For decision-makers committed to fiscal responsibility, safety, employment, and economic efficiency, the evidence decisively favors a maintenance-first approach to transportation infrastructure policy.