Roads and infrastructure
The city maintains 1,160 lane-kilometres of road on a budget that funds a fraction of what is needed. The honest answer is not “spend more.” It is “do less, do well”: every lane-kilometre eliminated saves $12,000 a year in maintenance forever.
Where I stand
Saint John maintains 1,160 lane-kilometres of road, roughly $1 billion of asset on the city books. In our climate, asphalt overlay lasts about 10 years before needing another. A full rebuild lasts 40 to 50. Just to keep the network from falling further behind, the city would need to resurface 116 lane-kilometres a year and rebuild around 25, somewhere between $25 and $40 million a year, every year, in perpetuity.
The 2026 capital budget puts $13.6 million toward roads. That is not negligence. That is math. The city has built more road than it can afford to maintain, and the deficit grows every winter regardless of what council does.
The answer is not “spend more”. There is not more to spend. The answer is “do less, do well”: maintain less, maintain it properly, and stop adding lane-kilometres we cannot afford. The point is structural efficiency, not austerity. Every lane-kilometre eliminated through a road diet is roughly $12,000 a year off the maintenance bill, forever. And the next time we would have had to rebuild that kilometre, we save around a million dollars more.
We have to choose how to allocate our limited budget. Arterials and transit corridors first. In denser neighbourhoods, each dollar and each metre of asphalt has more impact: more residents, more pedestrians, more trips, more economic activity per metre. Infrastructure investment should follow where the city is growing, not be spread evenly. That is matching cost to revenue. Fix what’s objectively used most first.
The capital backlog itself, the $545 million infrastructure deficit across the whole built environment, is too big for any one term to fix. We can’t even stop that from growing. What the next council can do is to slow the decline, and make the fallout less painful. Every greenfield permit adds a future maintenance bill. Every low-density approval is a promise of lifetime infrastructure support. The city’s job is to be honest about that, and to make sure new projects at least pay their own way (see also: Property tax, City finances).
What I will push for on council
- Prioritize road diets that eliminate lane-kilometres on streets that do not need them.
- Prioritize maintenance by density and use: arterials first, then dense neighbourhoods.
- Honest cost accounting on every greenfield approval: low-density permits should reflect the maintenance burden they create.