For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. It's something I've thought about a lot in the last few weeks.
On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1].
> To test this, Ostrom worked with the Indianapolis government and her students to measure the quality of policing. Surprisingly, against common assumptions, they found that the smaller the police force, the more positively residents evaluated the police services they got.
> "Increasing the size of [the police force] consistently had a negative impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service provision… smaller police departments … consistently outperformed their better trained and better financed larger neighbors.”
> But why did this happen? To explain this, Elinor Ostrom argued that in small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in community safety. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge of the local area & more trust from people.
Yes, we should rebuild the infrastructure. If more money is required we should find it. But we should find a way that holds the bureaucrats accountable on both the costs and the schedule; otherwise we will be throwing good money after the bad. My 2c.
Every city/county had their own "Bauhof" with a couple of construction workers and machines for all kinds of maintenance that a city had: snow plowing in the winter, pothole fillings and greenkeeping in the summer, pipe laying/maintenance, traffic lights and general lights maintenance, other infrastructure upkeep.
Today much of this is mandatory outsourced to the lowest bidder, with no way of accounting for regionality or quality.
To make it worse, cities and counties used to have capable public servants in architecture and supervision, which meant that for those projects where external help was needed (think construction of new projects) that work could be properly supervised and issues either prevented in the planning stage or caught during construction and remedied before that became too expensive. Nowadays, thanks to more and more budget cuts, pay in public service is a third to a half of the private sector which means that even if there were a budget no one would apply. In IT the situation is even more dire, which is why almost all major government IT projects fail, with the additional complexity that most IT projects have way too many stakeholders and no leadership.
We as Western societies need to roll back that privatization mandate, at least for areas where it has obviously failed.