Streets are the most valuable infrastructure a city owns, and one of the most expensive to keep. The costs that appear in public budgets are: building, maintaining and storing vehicles on public land. They are the costs nobody disputes, and they are the smaller part of the bill. The larger part are the external costs of passive mobility.
building and maintaining streets
Road construction and maintenance require large public spending, year after year.
The German figures below are indicative orders of magnitude, based on the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV), the Road and Transportation Research Association (FGSV) and EU comparative studies. Construction costs have risen sharply since 2021, so current figures tend to lie at the upper end.
New construction and full renovation, cost per kilometre
| road type | cost per km | main cost drivers |
|---|---|---|
| motorway, rural or open terrain | 10–20 million € | earthworks, drainage, standard gradients |
| motorway, urban or complex | 40–150+ million € | noise barriers, trough structures, land acquisition (A100 Berlin ≈ 148 million € per km) |
| federal or state road, rural | 3–8 million € | topography, drainage, accompanying cycle paths |
| urban main or arterial road | 5–12 million € | utility relocation, transit stops, pedestrian and cycle infrastructure |
| residential or local access road | 1,5–4 million € | shallower construction, traffic-calmed design |
| EU average, motorway | 8–15 million € | range across member states 4–25 million €, depending on terrain |
Bridges
- Standard road bridges cost between 3 500 € and 6 000 € per m² of deck area
- Converted to route length, that is 40–60 million € per km
- Replacing an ageing bridge while keeping traffic flowing adds 50–100 %, through temporary routing, demolition and traffic management.
Maintenance
- periodic surface renewal costs 200 000 – 500 000 € per km every 10 – 15 years
- annual structural preservation of motorways, including operation and repairs, averages 350 000 – 400 000 € per km
- on top of this come the running costs that recur every year whether or not anything is built: winter service, street lighting, traffic signals, drainage, sweeping, signs and markings.
parking subsidy
Beyond construction and maintenance, the largest mostly unpriced asset a city owns is the land used to store vehicles. A standard parking space takes up about 12,5 m² of prime public land, and in most European cities it is given away for free or for a fraction of what the same land earns in any other use. How large this subsidy is depends on what the space could otherwise be used for. Not all street space could lawfully or practically be let commercially, so the honest answer is a range, with a clear method:
| bound | method | what it shows |
|---|---|---|
| lower | local land value × area × the city’s cost of capital, plus construction and maintenance per space | what it costs the city to hold the land, whether or not it could be let |
| upper | rents and revenues achieved where comparable space has been converted: outdoor dining, micro-depots, mobility hubs, market stalls | what the space demonstrably earns once it is put to other use |
In central European locations, the upper bound runs to roughly 100–300 € or more per space per month. Residents’ parking permits in many European cities cost between 20 € and 120 € per year. Where this holds, the public subsidy is in the order of 1 000–3 000 € or more per space per year.
Oslo shows what the space is worth in practice. Its Car-Free Livability Programme turned more than 700 street parking spaces into outdoor dining, greenery, public art and cycle lanes.
Agora Verkehrswende’s Municipal Cost Accounting for Mobility provides the accounting framework for this calculation. The research turns it into a method any European city can apply with its own land values.
cities pay without receiving the revenue
The cost of streets falls mainly on cities, while the revenue from motor vehicles goes elsewhere. Germany serves as an example.The vehicle tax is going to the federal government. The federal states receive a fixed annual compensation for it, and cities receive a share of that indirectly through municipal financial equalisation, alongside dedicated transport funds. So the flow is not zero, but it has four weaknesses:
- it is indirect
- it passes through two levels of government before it reaches a city
- it is not earmarked. Nothing obliges a city to spend it on the streets that generated the cost
- it is not proportional. It bears no relation to the length, condition or traffic load of a city’s own network. It cannot be planned.
Because municipal streets make up the large majority of the road network, cities pay for construction, repair and maintenance from their general budgets. Every resident subsidises the passive mobility infrastructure, whith or without a car. The details differ between European countries, but the pattern is the same: vehicle-related revenue is collected national, street costs are borne greatly locally. And the gap is widening. As the fleet electrifies, fuel tax and car tax revenue decline year by year, while mass, space taken and wear on the street do not decline at all.