4 ms·

If new neighborhoods had to pay for their own pipes, roads, electrical hookups and couldn't put that on existing tax payers it'd help municipal finances a lot.

If new neighborhoods had to pay for their own pipes, roads, electrical hookups and couldn't put that on existing tax payers it'd help municipal finances a lot. Sprawl is expensive from an infrastructure perspective. And the spending to benefit a few at the expense of many is not unlike some sweet heart tax deal "bringing in good jobs" at the cost of several million dollars a pop

cyberax 3y ago
Sigh. Sprawl is _CHEAPER_ than dense cities for most infrastructure. To give you a perspective, one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. One mile of new light rail in Seattle will be enough to maintain all roads in Washington state for half a year. The same story for water, sewer, and electricity. Dense cities are _incredibly_ expensive to maintain because projects become extremely complicated, with lots of project management overhead (more people-hours). And people are EXPENSIVE, compared to raw materials.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  This isn’t a true cost analysis: NYC subway lines can simultaneously be more expensive in absolute terms and cheaper per commuter-mile-year. The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties. (This is true even when the subway is obscenely expensive to construct, as the 2nd Avenue line is. But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.)
  - cyberax 3y ago
    > This isn’t a true cost analysis: NYC subway lines can simultaneously be more expensive in absolute terms and cheaper per commuter-mile-year. It's not. > The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties. Nope. Roads in sparse cities are cheaper on per-commute and the building cost. > But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest. Why? Ever-rising costs is the inevitable result of densification.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      The NYC subway serves 1.8 billion rides in a down year, comprising tens of billions of passenger miles. Amortized over decades of 24/7 operation, there’s no road in the US that comes close to that, even with obscenely expensive deep tunneling. Roads are cheap on paper, and expensive per commuter-mile. Mass transit is expensive on paper, and cheap per commuter-mile, especially in dense cities.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        Do you think scary big numbers are significant in itself? Well, Houston carries about the same number of commuters. At a fraction of the cost.
        woodruffw 3y ago
        If the argument is about sustainable transportation, then yes: big numbers matter. Scale matters, and mass transit is the definition of scale. I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
        cyberax 3y ago
        No. Scary big numbers don't matter by themselves without a context. 1.8 billion rides per year for a 8-million city works out to less than 0.7 rides per day per capita. I can guarantee that Houston has more road trips. > Scale matters, and mass transit is the definition of scale. Yes, and multi-dozen billion dollar corruption on public projects is also the definition of scale. > I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that. I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
        woodruffw 3y ago
- Lvl999Noob 3y ago
  > one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway Is that freeway going through the middle of the city? I think not. Any construction in a dense city becomes expensive. But you need to divide that by the number of people using it as well. Everyone in the city can use a subway. Only that one house on top of the hill is using this pretty expensive road that goes to the top of the hill in the middle of nowhere.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    > Any construction in a dense city becomes expensive. Dude, that's literally the point I'm trying to make. Thank you.
    - Lvl999Noob 3y ago
      Dude. Did you read the rest of my comment? It is obviously expensive to spend 100U (some hypothetical unit since I don't wanna waste time looking for the exact numbers) instead of 10U. But it is more expensive when each one of a 1000 people have to spend that 10U rather than all of those 1000 people contributing 0.1U to get 100U total.
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- jltsiren 3y ago
  Light rail is ~$27 million/mile and subway is ~$290 million/mile, if you look at the numbers for the latest finished projects in Finland. American infrastructure is unreasonably expensive because, for a number of reasons, Americans lack the ability and interest to build it efficiently. Dense cities are common around the world. In most of them, the infrastructure is not particularly expensive.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    > Light rail is ~$27 million/mile and subway is ~$290 million/mile, if you look at the numbers for the latest finished projects in Finland. Finland is tiny. Even Helsinki is a bit less dense than Seattle, and almost 10 times less dense than Manhattan. So yep, sparse cities are much cheaper and efficient than dense cities. That's exactly my point. The sparser, the better.
    - jltsiren 3y ago
      Your comparison is based on administrative borders rather than on the cities themselves. If you compare population densities in urban areas (as listed in Wikipedia), Seattle has 3600 people / square mile, Helsinki has 4800 people / square mile, and NYC has 6000 people / square mile. Typical Helsinki consists of medium-density residential areas separated by large parks and forested areas. The urban core is dense but not particularly tall. The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        > Your comparison is based on administrative borders rather than on the cities themselves. "Urban areas" are poorly defined in many cases. In some cases (e.g. "Greater Houston Area") they match what people think about "Houston", Seattle metro area does not. > The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing. Yes, and? Helsinki is still sparsely populated, so new infrastructure is cheap enough. The costs go up, once the density increases.
- dmwilcox 3y ago
  Re: expensive. Hard disagree. To put things in technology terms roads don't scale to meet commuters needs. And as others have pointed out it is a unit cost problem with your reasoning (total cost per commute). At some scale we aggregate processing and trade latency for bandwidth (busy poll versus hardware interrupts). We trade the ability for everyone to start their journey _right now_ for the ability for lots more of us to get to our destination via a common carriage (be this packets or people the pattern is the same). Where land is cheap and commuter traffic isn't an issue maybe roads make sense but that doesn't mean sprawl is cheap in time-spent.

cyberax 3y ago

Sigh. Sprawl is _CHEAPER_ than dense cities for most infrastructure. To give you a perspective, one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. One mile of new light rail in Seattle will be enough to maintain all roads in Washington state for half a year. The same story for water, sewer, and electricity. Dense cities are _incredibly_ expensive to maintain because projects become extremely complicated, with lots of project management overhead (more people-hours). And people are EXPENSIVE, compared to raw materials.

woodruffw 3y ago
This isn’t a true cost analysis: NYC subway lines can simultaneously be more expensive in absolute terms and cheaper per commuter-mile-year. The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties. (This is true even when the subway is obscenely expensive to construct, as the 2nd Avenue line is. But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.)
- cyberax 3y ago
  > This isn’t a true cost analysis: NYC subway lines can simultaneously be more expensive in absolute terms and cheaper per commuter-mile-year. It's not. > The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties. Nope. Roads in sparse cities are cheaper on per-commute and the building cost. > But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest. Why? Ever-rising costs is the inevitable result of densification.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    The NYC subway serves 1.8 billion rides in a down year, comprising tens of billions of passenger miles. Amortized over decades of 24/7 operation, there’s no road in the US that comes close to that, even with obscenely expensive deep tunneling. Roads are cheap on paper, and expensive per commuter-mile. Mass transit is expensive on paper, and cheap per commuter-mile, especially in dense cities.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      Do you think scary big numbers are significant in itself? Well, Houston carries about the same number of commuters. At a fraction of the cost.
      - woodruffw 3y ago
        If the argument is about sustainable transportation, then yes: big numbers matter. Scale matters, and mass transit is the definition of scale. I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
        cyberax 3y ago
        No. Scary big numbers don't matter by themselves without a context. 1.8 billion rides per year for a 8-million city works out to less than 0.7 rides per day per capita. I can guarantee that Houston has more road trips. > Scale matters, and mass transit is the definition of scale. Yes, and multi-dozen billion dollar corruption on public projects is also the definition of scale. > I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that. I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
        woodruffw 3y ago
Lvl999Noob 3y ago
> one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway Is that freeway going through the middle of the city? I think not. Any construction in a dense city becomes expensive. But you need to divide that by the number of people using it as well. Everyone in the city can use a subway. Only that one house on top of the hill is using this pretty expensive road that goes to the top of the hill in the middle of nowhere.
- cyberax 3y ago
  > Any construction in a dense city becomes expensive. Dude, that's literally the point I'm trying to make. Thank you.
  - Lvl999Noob 3y ago
    Dude. Did you read the rest of my comment? It is obviously expensive to spend 100U (some hypothetical unit since I don't wanna waste time looking for the exact numbers) instead of 10U. But it is more expensive when each one of a 1000 people have to spend that 10U rather than all of those 1000 people contributing 0.1U to get 100U total.
- deleted 3y ago
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jltsiren 3y ago
Light rail is ~$27 million/mile and subway is ~$290 million/mile, if you look at the numbers for the latest finished projects in Finland. American infrastructure is unreasonably expensive because, for a number of reasons, Americans lack the ability and interest to build it efficiently. Dense cities are common around the world. In most of them, the infrastructure is not particularly expensive.
- cyberax 3y ago
  > Light rail is ~$27 million/mile and subway is ~$290 million/mile, if you look at the numbers for the latest finished projects in Finland. Finland is tiny. Even Helsinki is a bit less dense than Seattle, and almost 10 times less dense than Manhattan. So yep, sparse cities are much cheaper and efficient than dense cities. That's exactly my point. The sparser, the better.
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    Your comparison is based on administrative borders rather than on the cities themselves. If you compare population densities in urban areas (as listed in Wikipedia), Seattle has 3600 people / square mile, Helsinki has 4800 people / square mile, and NYC has 6000 people / square mile. Typical Helsinki consists of medium-density residential areas separated by large parks and forested areas. The urban core is dense but not particularly tall. The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      > Your comparison is based on administrative borders rather than on the cities themselves. "Urban areas" are poorly defined in many cases. In some cases (e.g. "Greater Houston Area") they match what people think about "Houston", Seattle metro area does not. > The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing. Yes, and? Helsinki is still sparsely populated, so new infrastructure is cheap enough. The costs go up, once the density increases.
dmwilcox 3y ago
Re: expensive. Hard disagree. To put things in technology terms roads don't scale to meet commuters needs. And as others have pointed out it is a unit cost problem with your reasoning (total cost per commute). At some scale we aggregate processing and trade latency for bandwidth (busy poll versus hardware interrupts). We trade the ability for everyone to start their journey _right now_ for the ability for lots more of us to get to our destination via a common carriage (be this packets or people the pattern is the same). Where land is cheap and commuter traffic isn't an issue maybe roads make sense but that doesn't mean sprawl is cheap in time-spent.