Collector roads serve areas.

$1.5mil, assuming a 10 year life, would need 7500 people at $20/yr each, or 3000 households at 2.5 ppl/household. Assuming each household is a quarter acre, that's 750 acres, or about 1.2 sq mi. That's a depth of .6 mile on either side of the mile of road. (Which is a depths of 15 lots. I think.)

Edit: $10-$20 per month. Well, there's a lot of other roads needed, too.

> $1.5mil, assuming a 10 year life,

You don't perform a reconstruction after 10 years.

You need a reconstruction when you have done zero maintenance for 30 years. Or else if there are 1000 loaded lorries roaming on your street everyday :-)

Otherwise you can do with some (partial or full) resurfacing after 5/10 years. That's much much cheaper.

I agree with Strong Towns that we've gone overboard on cars, parking, highways, and sprawl. But their focus on road costs is not based on facts. I checked my town budget and roads are <10% of the budget. The vast majority (2/3) is hiring cops and firefighters and parks staff.

But most suburban streets are very low traffic, and low-weight traffic roads. They are not arterials / collectors. And you rarely need a full reconstruct. So even trusting the given quotes, you generally are good with the "resurfacing" column, and you can aim well below the smaller price for arterial/collector.

If I take my local prices, resurfacing 1 mile of a 6 yards wide road, is less than $250.000. And that's with full refurbishing for a pretty damaged road + a new asphalt concrete surface! If you just do preventive maintenance with single-layer or bi-layer that can be 5 or even 10 times less...

(Sorry about the probably imperfect technical terms translations).