Use-Based Infrastructure Funding is funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance. It sits in the Incentives dimension (INC) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-INC-0281, within the Government Perverse Pattern family. The core principle: funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance. In incentive terms, it matters because it changes the payoff people perceive before they choose — which means it can be designed for, or exploited.
Scientific Definition
Funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance.
Plain-English Definition
Funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance.
Feynman Explanation
Build it bigger. Let it rot quieter.
Core Principle
Funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Funding formulas pre-decide infrastructure outcomes.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Build it bigger. Let it rot quieter.
Examples
- Crumbling bridges adjacent to brand-new interchanges.
- Funding formulas pre-decide infrastructure outcomes.
Pending editorial review.
Original analysis from The Incentives Lab — how this element behaves inside real payoff structures.
Why this element matters to incentive design
This element is common enough to feel like human nature and specific enough to be engineered around. The mechanism underneath it is straightforward: funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance. You can recognize it in the field by its signature: build it bigger. Let it rot quieter. Every element in the Incentives dimension changes the perceived payoff of an action before the action happens, which is exactly where incentive design has leverage.
How it gets exploited
Left undesigned, funding formulas pre-decide infrastructure outcomes. It is amplified whenever funding formulas pre-decide infrastructure outcomes. Inside organizations that shows up as funding formulas pre-decide infrastructure outcomes. The pattern is the same one Goodhart's Law describes: the measurable proxy attracts the effort, and the purpose behind it quietly loses funding.
How the Lab designs around it
The redesign move is to state-of-good-repair funding floors. The leverage is not in explaining the behavior to people. It is in changing what the behavior earns.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- State-of-good-repair funding floors.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- State-of-good-repair funding floors.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
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Candidates dependent on large donors become structurally responsive to donor priorities over voter priorities.
High-velocity quotas for enumerators turn data collection into fiction-writing.
Forcing exhaustion of annual research budgets pushes agencies to fund speculative work for baseline protection.
Generous post-disaster aid lowers the political cost of skipping preventive infrastructure investment.
Aggressive enforcement and complex eligibility turn a safety net into a liability trap.
Politicians optimize for the next election, not the next generation.
Subsidized rural flight frequency forces fuel-burning empty flights to secure annual payouts.
Subsidizing coastal living and freezing flood maps treats catastrophic risk as a public liability.
Federal funds subsidize new lanes while states absorb perpetual maintenance.
Federal policy forces homeowners to rebuild doomed structures while waiting on mitigation buyouts.
Where Use-Based Infrastructure Funding is cited in the corpus
Essays, field guides, and diagnostics from The Incentives Lab that apply this element.
- Field guideIncentives: definition, types, examples
The parent field guide for this element.
- ReferenceThe laws of incentives
Goodhart, Campbell, and the Cobra Effect.
- EssayWhy Government Transformation Stalls
The public-sector version of this pattern.
- ReferenceThe Periodic Table of Human Behavior
The full 1,267-element map this page belongs to.
- ReferenceThe incentive glossary
Definitions for every mental model, bias, and fallacy in the corpus.
Questions about Use-Based Infrastructure Funding
- What is Use-Based Infrastructure Funding?
- Use-Based Infrastructure Funding is funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance. It sits in the Incentives dimension (INC) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-INC-0281, within the Government Perverse Pattern family. The core principle: funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance. In incentive terms, it matters because it changes the payoff people perceive before they choose — which means it can be designed for, or exploited.
- What is an example of Use-Based Infrastructure Funding?
- Funding formulas pre-decide infrastructure outcomes. The Incentives Lab catalogs everyday, organizational, and historical instances of this element on its Human Behavior Taxonomy™ page (HBT-INC-0281).
- How is Use-Based Infrastructure Funding exploited?
- Funding formulas pre-decide infrastructure outcomes.
- How do you design around Use-Based Infrastructure Funding?
- State-of-good-repair funding floors.
- Which behavioral dimension does Use-Based Infrastructure Funding belong to?
- Use-Based Infrastructure Funding is classified in the Incentives dimension (INC) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™, family "Government Perverse Pattern", class "Perverse Incentive". Its permanent identifier is HBT-INC-0281 and its evidence grade is C.