The Rebuild NY Now campaign, which aims to raise awareness about the state’s failing infrastructure and actively lobby for more state funding to be allocated to the construction of safe roads, bridges, and public buildings (like schools and hospitals), recently came to Rochester during its second statewide tour.
On Thursday, December 4, the organization held a press conference involving local politicians, members of organized labor groups, and owners of local businesses; the visit came shortly after the group released a 30-second TV ad and a 60-second radio ad, both broadcast on stations across the state, highlighting the importance of better infrastructure.
According to Rebuild NY Now, for every $1 billion spent on infrastructure construction and maintenance, about 28,000 new jobs are created in the community.
Additionally, as drivers in Upstate New York well know, poorly-maintained roads in the region are a constant source of anxiety; as much money as the state spends on re-paving roads and filling in potholes after sheets of ice and layers of road salt melt down into the asphalt, it’s estimated that each individual driver in New York will spend an average of $1,500 on vehicle repairs, because of poor road conditions.
The dangers of poorly-maintained roads even go beyond financial implications: New York state saw about 300,000 individual car accidents each year, for the past three years, and considering that there are about 5.5 million car accidents in the entire country each year, this means that New York state car accidents make up around 6% of all car crashes nationwide.
To put this in perspective, if those 5.5 million crashes were divided equally between 50 states, each state would have just over 100,000 accidents per year. It’s no coincidence that New York has an unusually high number of car accidents, and that many regions in the state suffer from very poor road conditions.
Supporters of campaign include prominent Rochester residents Maggie Brooks (Monroe County Executive) and Sandy Parker (President of the Rochester Business Alliance). Brooks stated that improved infrastructure will necessarily contribute “to any community’s quality of life,” while Parker noted that a city’s infrastructure is the “critical backbone of commerce.”
No Comment