The difference is that we elect the officials in charge of the roads.

Of course they all like to push off maintenance as long as possible to avoid tax increases, but they will do them. Private industry will literally choose to wait for failure rather than do maintenance because they've discovered things can last longer than expected and they save more money by waiting for a catastrophe (and they can extra more government funds as they "don't have the resources" to fix a problem. See california's PG&E [1]).

The perfect example of this is the train system in the US and the problem we have with derailments. The US has more derailments than basically anyone else and the reason for this is that the rail owners aren't doing maintenance.

[1] https://www.actionnewsnow.com/news/top-stories/is-pg-e-press...