Will politics lead to over-building or under-building of transportation projects? In this paper, we develop a model of infrastructure policy in which politicians overdo things that have hidden costs and underperform tasks whose costs voters readily perceive. Consequently, national funding of transportation leads to overspending, since voters more readily perceive the upside of new projects than the future taxes that will be paid for distant highways. Yet when local voters are well-informed, the highly salient nuisances of local construction, including land taking and noise, lead to under-building. This framework explains the decline of urban mega-projects in the US (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003) as the result of increasingly educated and organized urban voters. Our framework also predicts more per capita transportation spending in low-density and less educated areas, which seems to be empirically correct.

政治会导致交通项目过度建设还是建设不足？在本文中，我们建立了一个基础设施政策模型，其中政客们过分地执行了具有隐藏成本的事情，而表现不佳的任务却使选民容易意识到。因此，国家的交通运输资金会导致超支，因为选民比将来为遥远的高速公路支付的税款更容易意识到新项目的好处。但是，当当地选民了解情况时，对当地建设的高度关注（包括征地和噪音）会导致建筑不足。这个框架解释了由于受过良好教育和有组织的城市选民的影响，美国城市大型项目的减少（Altshuler和Luberoff，2003年）。