My understanding for why we don’t fill potholes is because municipal governments permit developers to build on greenfields, extending a city’s existing infrastructure past reasonable distances for transit, policing, firefighting, and utilities to serve in an affordable way. So taxes go up.

And then politicians make bad policies like freezing or pausing the gas tax, while charging people in EVs additional road tax purportedly to replace the gas tax they aren’t paying on their <1% of the cars on the road.

So there is less money available to repair bridges, as small-government means fewer bridges get inspected or repaired in a given year. Highway crews have too much to do, so surfaces get broken and roads go to waste with heavier vehicles because our rail lines were sold off by the feds to American companies and removed rails from lots of places.

“In the next five years the railways abandoned over 1,450 (2,333 km) miles of prairie branch lines, half of this process taking place in Saskatchewan. Branch line abandonment was accompanied by closure of much of the vast network of country grain elevators. This brought an increase in hauling distances for farmers, with resulting negative effects on Saskatchewan’s network of secondary highways.”