Brandon Bell/Getty Images Odds are, you've never visited Ruston, Louisiana, because it's the kind of city you only see if you're driving through Shreveport or couldn't force yourself to attend LSU. Both are also five hours from New Orleans, the only place worth visiting in the entire state (sorry, Baton Rouge, but you know it's true). While Ruston may not have a Cheesecake Factory, it does straddle I-20, making it a perfect location for Buc-ee's to build its first Louisiana location. Which should be great for Ruston... except for the part where the Shreveport Times reports that preparing for all that extra traffic will cost the city millions. Ah, yes. Our old friend, Infrastructure. It always costs more than you think it should, and that doesn't always change once you learn that lesson. In order to get ready for all the drivers stopping for gas and brisket at Louisiana's first Buc-ee's, Ruston reportedly needs a new access road and some traffic light upgrades. That service road is expected to cost $3 million, and the traffic light upgrades will be about $8 million, bringing the total cost for the city of Ruston up to $11 million before the gas station even opens next April. When Louisiana's first Buc-ee's does open, though, it'll be big enough that you could easily see how a mere $11 million might not be enough to deal with all that newly concentrated gas station traffic. The store itself will be huge, clocking in at just under 75,000 square feet, the fuel center will have at least 100 gas pumps, and Buc-ee's says it expects an average of about 15,000 cars a day (or 450,000 cars a month and more than five million cars every year). That's a lot of traffic for a city that's home to a university Forbes says is one of the top 106 colleges in the South. It could easily be so much worse Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images If you'd argue the giant corporation building the giant gas station should probably be the one paying for the infrastructure upgrades instead of the city, you won't hear any disagreements from me. I'd also argue they wouldn't need the service road to better facilitate pickups and dropoffs at the local middle school if more kids just rode the bus, but alas. This is America. Still, once you look a little deeper into how much road infrastructure actually costs, you'll quickly realize $11 million is actually pretty cheap. Construction costs vary widely depending on the state, so paving a one-mile section of road in California costs way more than it would in a state no one wants to live in, like North Dakota or Missouri. But good luck finding a state in this country where laying down one mile of asphalt costs less than half a million dollars. And while road construction sounds like it should be pretty cheap in Louisiana, the latest Annual Traffic Report linked above ranks it 35th, which means it's far from being the state that knows how to get a lot in return for the money it spends on road infrastructure. It isn't just asphalt, either. If it's infrastructure-related, it's expensive. Period. Yes, even sidewalks. If you live somewhere that requires single-family homeowners to maintain their sidewalks, repairing one section could easily cost more than $1,000, and back in 2017, Los Angeles was offering homeowners up to $10,000 to repair the sidewalks in front of their houses. For just a few feet of concrete. Like I said, infrastructure is expensive. When you need things to last, though, that costs money. You can always cheap out, but that usually means you'll just spend more in the long run, while also being forced to listen to random people who think the Vimes Boots Theory is still some new idea no one else knows about. I'm not just talking about road infrastructure, either. Think clothes are too expensive because no shirt should ever cost more than $25? Congratulations, your shirts suck and won't last. Think everything China makes is cheap crap? That's because you buy cheap crap. Which may be fine with electronics, but when it comes to road infrastructure, we really need that stuff to last.
Liked by Ethan Brown, Daniel Gagnon
Liked by Ethan Brown, Daniel Gagnon
Liked by Ethan Brown, Daniel Gagnon
