There is, of course, never enough money to go around. We all demand safe roads and bridges, we want great schools and the best public services—but who wants higher taxes, or increased tolls, to pay for it all? With resources forever tight, it’s an easy guess what gets squeezed. “If I were a legislator,” Fred Salvucci says, “I’d give the money to the person who’s going to save a little kid, too. How can you compete with that each year?”

Thus underfunded, MassHighway, like other state agencies, borrows at an almost comical level to keep itself afloat. Of the 1,800 or so workers who remain at the department, the salaries of about 80 percent are paid via the issuance of bonds. Beyond the questionable financial practice of paying interest for 20 years on an employee’s salary—or on police cars, computers, lawn mowing, or any of the other ludicrous uses of borrowed state money—using bonds this way is disastrous for another reason. Massachusetts places a limit on how much it bonds each year (about $1.5 billion for fiscal year 2008), so every borrowed dime for salaries is a borrowed dime unavailable for, say, fixing a bridge. In 2004 more than 40 percent of the money the state spent on its highways went to paying off existing debt, the highest percentage in the country.

And at the same time our agencies are crying for funding to take care of the assets we already have, state leaders continue to promote costly new transportation projects. Just one example is the planned new South Coast Rail link that would bring commuter rail service to Fall River and New Bedford. The line, supported by Governor Patrick, is expected to cost $1.4 billion. Forget for a moment the T’s current $2.7 billion maintenance backlog and inability to keep its existing trains running on time: The project’s cost estimate itself reveals the sort of wrong-headed thinking that helped get us into this mess in the first place.

Over the life of a piece of infrastructure, construction will account for only 10 to 20 percent of its total cost, according to Northeastern University professor Joseph Giglio, a noted transportation thinker. The rest is maintenance. Understood this way, if the South Coast Rail line were to appear fully constructed, free of charge, tomorrow, it would still end up costing Massachusetts at least $7 billion in maintenance and repairs over its life cycle. That future financial obligation appears nowhere in the cost estimates—and it’s possible that the very officials pushing the project do not understand this crucial fact themselves.