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Infrastructure costs scale approximately linearly with road frontage. 1000 feet of road with associated water lines, power lines, street lights, etc, costs roug
by ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Infrastructure costs scale approximately linearly with road frontage. 1000 feet of road with associated water lines, power lines, street lights, etc, costs roughly the same whether it serves ten households or fifty.
A sustainable development will necessarily have a high number of households per foot of road frontage. This will not have the suburban look and feel of single-family homes with yards. At best it's going to be medium-density townhomes and row-houses to eliminate wasting infrastructure on the space between houses.
- majormajor 9y agoThe future of the suburbs depends greatly on renewable, clean sources of energy. Reuse and recycling of resources is also important, but for things like power lines or water pipes, seems less so (more for things like those self-driving-electric-cars everyone's waiting for to give them suburbs + not having to drive in stop and go traffic). Of course, so does the future of the city, just in a denser package, so it has better per-capita figures in many ways - but is there a scenario where we can get enough of it to power cities but not cities + suburbs? That seems unlikely to me.