I once lived on a street that was incredibly badly maintained. The city informed the residents that they would be repaving the street and the residents campaigned hard for the city not to do that, for precisely the reasons you're talking about here.
Their campaign was successful, in no small measure because a poll of the residents showed 95% of them opposed the repaving, and that the local paper wrote a big story about the whole affair.
That's not the thinking at all, though. The thinking is that the road being in rough shape means that everyone is forced to drive at a sane speed through a residential street where children are frequently playing.
In other words, the "nice thing" isn't actually so nice in terms of the things that the people on that street really care about.
Their campaign was successful, in no small measure because a poll of the residents showed 95% of them opposed the repaving, and that the local paper wrote a big story about the whole affair.