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I don't live in the US so those aren't really concerns for me. My quiet suburb has been able to keep the roads and pipes maintained while also keep property ta

• village-idiot 8y ago
  Complexity matters, but gets swamped when you start talking about increasing infrastructure per person by an order of magnitude. Keep in mind that spread out suburbs also produce less tax revenue per acre, and thus less revenue per public dollar spent. There are “rich” suburbs in the US where a 100% tax rate wouldn’t cover future maintenance obligations.
  • wott 8y ago
    No, I confirm what jbob2000 said: in my country (which is probably different from his), the local taxes (and the state subsidies) go up as density goes up. Those are per inhabitant (and they don't comprise funding for regional equipments, just for the use of the municipality). I think they are a very good proxy for public infrastructure cost. They are lowest in rural municipalities, then they are small towns, then it gradually grows as you go closer to the centre of a metropolis through the suburbs. Every single infrastructure work costs a lot more in a dense area. It also needs to be fixed a lot more often, it degrades faster. It also affects negatively more people and businesses. It also cannot be upgraded so easily when population grows (the streets cannot be made larger, or for example at my place I cannot use water any more between 7 and 8 am because there is not enough pressure when everyone pulls water in the morning since every year the neighbourhood gets denser). Empirically it seems the cost of infrastructure (construction, maintenance, upgrade) grows faster than the number of inhabitants it supports, contrarily to the theory. And furthermore they are often less efficient: if you compare the speed of transportation in a dense city and in a small city or between small cities, it is night and day. Walking is slower in a dense city, cycling is slower, driving is slower, public transportation is slower... It barely gets compensated by the reduction in distances between origins and destinations. I mean, it often takes close to one hour to do less than 10 km in a dense city or its close suburb by public transportation. You'd do 40-50 km by country bus, or 75 km by car, or 120 km in train in the same time across the countryside. Small cities also barely know about traffic congestion. I mean, I used to believe that density was a magic bullet since you could pack proportionality more people on the same resource. But the observation showed me otherwise, so I changed my mind.
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    • village-idiot 8y ago
      You’re making the mistake of looking at total spending, not per capita or per economic growth. It’s not surprising that cities spend more on infrastructure in total, but they spend a lot less on infrastructure per capita. Better still, they tend to have more economic activity per public dollar spent. The point is to be efficient with public dollars and generate the maximal economic activity per public dollar. In this way things like public transit blow rural and suburban roads out of the water. Measuring traveling speed is silly. What matters is time spent to get to services, jobs, food, and similar. You measure this based on time and cost, not distance and speed. Oh, and ultra dense cities can offer more choices for short distance travel. I can get my commute down to 12 minutes by bike or 8 by electric scooter. This reduces wear and tear on the roads a lot, and packs more people per lane mile of road, meaning that my economic activity costs the public less in terms of infrastructure cost. This doesn’t work in low density suburbs (at least not in America). While I can’t speak to your country, I can say that the vast majority of public subsidies in the United States actually flow to suburbs and not inner cities. Without federal largesse, suburbs would stop being a middle class expectation and return to being an ultra wealthy luxury.