Creates rent! Benefits the community! Reduces fuel usage! Reduces drivers' frustration! Speeds traffic! Reduces congestion! Shortens commutes! Promotes commerce!
It is clearly worth setting up incentives for contractors to finish work such as the replacement bridge in Minneapolis ahead of schedule.
It is also worthwhile for communities and states to pay their contractors more to shift the work to nighttime hours, or work on three shifts, to complete infrastructure projects which hold up thousands of cars and trucks every morning and evening rush hour.
How should we pay for the extra costs of those incentive programs? Of requiring nighttime work or 3-shift work on such projects? Should we tax people's wages? Their capital gains? Their purchases? Their buildings? The tourists' car rentals? The business travelers' hotel rooms?
Or ought we to tax that which rises and falls on the results of our investment in infrastructure and services: land value!
What else does opening that replacement bridge a few months earlier do? It raises land values, on both ends of the bridge, and for miles beyond.
(This might tell us something useful about the bridge to nowhere/Gravina Island. We should build it when it will pay for itself via an increase in the value of the land on each end of the bridge. And we should use the increase in land value to pay for it!)
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