The Ripple Effect of Neglect

 

Look at this photo, it looks like an eyesore, maybe a small inconvenience, but that tiny dip in the road is more than a nuisance. It's a chain reaction waiting to cripple an economy.

 

The first blue lands on vehicles, shocks scatter, tires bust, suspensions give way. Owners spend more money fixing what should not be broken.

That money they lost was supposed to circulate in school fees, small savings, maybe even seed capital for taxable income generating hustle. Instead, it goes to patchwork repairs. Taxable income reduces, government revenue shrinks.

That same government already struggling now has even less income to fix the next road. Then the holes multiply. Now think about commerce.

An e-commerce company like FastestCakes.com buys a delivery vehicle, a pink baby and expects to use it for 5 years. Bad roads cut that life to 3. Depreciation runs faster, profit margins shrink. With lower profits comes lower corporate taxes.

 

That is less money again for the government to build infrastructure. Same hole, same story. We are forgetting the traffic that follows.

Drivers slow down, they swerve, they stop. A van that could make 20 deliveries in a day is now making 12. Multiply that inefficiency across thousands of vehicles in one city alone and you have GDP bleeding in bloody light.

Every wasted minute is lost value. Workers are trapped too. Leave your house at 8am and you still arrive late.

One hour lost every day becomes 5 hours in a week. 20 in a month. That's almost a full workweek gone.

 

Employers keep paying salaries but output drops. The economy is buying time, not productivity. Students also suffer.

Late to school, tired in class, learning half of what they should. Education is the pipeline for the workforce and we're already compromising it before the graduates even hit the labour market. These indirect costs do not show up on government spreadsheets but they are real.

Stress from traffic, fatigue, wasted fuel, health bills from exhaustion. These things chip away at creativity, efficiency and long term capacity. Now imagine not one pothole but a hundred, 10,000 across a nation.

 

Instead of money going into innovation, it leaks into repairs. Instead of time going into productivity, it drowns in traffic. Instead of growth, it gets stagnation.

 

That's how a hole in the road becomes a hole in GDP.