One thing I've learned over the years is that fixing or upgrading something is an order of magnitude more time but an order of magnitude cheaper in materials/energy. This applies at many scales. Time means jobs and expertise. Upgrading doesn't scale, which is awesome. This is because fixing or upgrading stuff is essentially always a custom job. You can't outsource the maintenance of the Golden Gate bridge to China. It's gotta be done locally.

Fixing requires people to assess and evaluate the specific needs of a situation, engineer and design solutions, and then deploy them. That drives an engineering and problem-solving, educated populace full of professionals, rather than a machine that cranks out endless, throwaway garbage. America has strayed from engineering and fixing towards "scale"--but mostly scaling the last part, the deployment. It's short-term thinking. It's a pervasive baseline mindset shift that has happened because of bad accounting centered around dollar costs and not societal costs.

And they’re in this predicament precisely because they built unaffordable car-first infrastructure in the first place. Saying that they can’t afford the more cost-effective option (walk, bike, tram) is just icing on the cake.

> Unaffordable for the City

Isn't this the city that gave a few hundred million away from it's earmarked infrastructure and maintenance budge to the police department over the past half decade?