Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [ST07]

Well, you're parking it in other places as well, I assume, unless you're only making pleasure rides with no stops at all. I am speaking more generally than just about your particular situation, which I obviously don't know. But in case you live in an American suburb: their entire financial setup is unsound, which arguably means even your own ground is subsidized. I find the arguments of Strong Towns and Not Just Bikes quite compelling: ▶ this video .

This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums link Noise pollution link Infrastructure strain ▶ this video More on Infrastructure and Sprawl link Articles: link's%20less%20expensive%20than%20owning,to%20take%20further%20climate%20action. link link Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: link The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.

I'd recommend watching this video by "Not Just Bikes": [Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math](▶ this video). The city also has to pay for utility lines, which are much more expensive in suburban sprawl than the urban center. Also, zoning laws make it more expensive to build apartments, so you really only get single-family houses in the suburbs and apartments in the inner city. If you use property taxes to pay for infrastructure, the inner-city residents (living in apartments, and likely poorer) are paying most of the money for infrastructure they never use.

Curious, have you considered the in-between here? Consider medium-density European cities, which still have massively higher density suburbs, but rarely the density -- combined employment and population densities -- of the urban core of most American cities. I hated living in Seattle, but I'm now an American finding I enjoy living in London. I walk around trees and birds every day, because I have good park access, and I can walk to them without having to worry about car traffic. For what it's worth, by the way, you almost certainly AREN'T willing to pay for the infrastructure that supports you: Suburbs are almost overwhelmingly economically supported by cities. I hate NotJustBikes (his self-righteous attitude is just awful), but he does have a great video on this: ▶ this video

If that's what you've taken away from it, you need to rewatch it; the financial theme is not "sustainable cities are impossible" the theme is "American sprawling car dependent suburbia is insolvent because it doesn't generate enough tax revenue to pay for the sprawling roads/water/sewage/garbage disposal/other services that it uses", and it's like a Ponzi scheme where the construction and sale of a new chunk of suburbs pays for the maintenance work on the previous one. Denser inner-city areas generate much more tax revenue with less cost of services because they have to cover a smaller area, and this can be solvent and subsidises the suburbs. ▶ this video "Suburbs are subsidized: Here's the Math" NB. the last time I linked this on HN someone dismissed it as "Strong towns propaganda" claiming that if suburbs didn't exist, everyone would starve. They completely failed to respond to followup questions about cities which are not sprawling suburbs and are not starving. link

Because "Office Vacancy Rate in San Francisco Just Hit a New High", That means property owners aren't making money. Workers aren't out spending to come in, stay and leave. All that is taxable, which is why government officials want people back in the office. In every city, the downtown core's tax revenue subsidizes the suburban sprawl all around it. Good overview of the research on this: ▶ this video

> There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere Roads pre-date cars. Cars muscled in and took over, forced humans off the roads onto sidewalks. Now car drivers say it cannot be economically justified for people to move around outside cars? This is "car-brain" thinking. If the cars were banned, people could walk and cycle and wheelchair and skate on the roads their taxes are already paying for. They aren't "car roads", they are just roads - cycles are allowed on them. Car drivers don't want to share, don't want to slow down, keep hitting and killing people, can't control their vehicles safely, so demand cyclists be moved somewhere else - then complain about the cost of doing that! People say cars have taken over, they want somewhere safe from the dangers of cars, car drivers say no it's too expensive to make yourself safe from me commuting through the places you live and work! It's crazy land. As if the only reason Christchurch exists at all is for cars to drive through. Can you point to a report that has a cost/beneift analysis of each individual road in Christchurch? Because when Urban3 set out to find out that kind of thing in USA and Canadian cities[2] they found that the dense urban centers ("poor") were the parts of a city with enough tax revenue to cover their infrastructure costs, and the sparse suburbs ("rich") were being subsidised by them. The people in city center apartments, possibly without cars, possibly transit riders, pay for the sprawling suburbs which need long roads and infrastructure serving relatively few houses and businesses, which don't generate enough revenue to pay for those roads, sewers, water pipes, storm drains, electricity supply, etc. New Zealand $301M is about £139M in UK pounds. Wikipedia has a list of road projects in the UK[1],including: - Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet. 16 km, £507 million. - Morpeth and Felton, 12.9Km, £260M. (Morpeth population: 14k) - M54 to M6 motorway link road, 2.5km, £200M. - Shrewsbury North West Relief Road, 6km, estimated £120M (population: 77k). - Arundel bypass, cost £320M (population: 3.5k). - Newark-upon-Trent bypass, 6.5Km, cost £400-£500M (population: 30k). Building more roads doesn't reduce traffic. It makes driving easier, quicker, more convenient, which increases the temptation to drive, increases the number of journeys, incentivises and encourages driving, makes traffic worse. Can you point me to a cost/benefit analysis of spending half a billion pounds on one of these road schemes to "reduce traffic" by doing something that doesn't reduce traffic, something that makes traffic worse? Spending 2-10x the cost of rail per km, while moving 1/20th the amount of people compared to rail, polluting more than rail? [1] link [2] ▶ this video

▶ this video (One of a series) link A few videos on why this is (and I apologize for my language) incredibly selfish and idiotic. tl;dw Owning a car in an American suburb is extremely expensive, and (especially if you disagree) your pleasant commute is likely being heavily subsidized (particularly by less-well-off Texans who you are forcing to live in worse conditions, and to pay proportionally more of their income to cover their own car dependency).

> If you actually cared about safety you’d require airbags, crumple zones, licensing, insurance, and crash testing for cyclists. I've crashed on a bicycle, more than once. I've crashed even on a motorcycle (on a racetrack). The damage that is caused to myself, to my machine, and the surrounds, is tiny compared to the damage that is caused by an automobile with (at least) an order of magnitude more mass: a friend of mine had a car go through the front of his house, and the physical carnage was impressive (no person was injured thankfully). And every time licensing has been looked at for cyclists, it has found to be a dumb idea: * link > You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing. Cars cause much more damage to roads than bicyclists, and they should pay proportionally: * link * link And bicyclists already pay for local roads through local property taxes: * link The problem is that roads are now practically monopolized for private vehicle use to the exclusion of everyone else, and the costs are not fully paid for by drivers. Higher density areas subsidize lower density ones, and road infrastructure is a big part of that: * ▶ this video

> The US is a continent spanning nation How is that relevant? No one commutes from NY to LA everyday, much as no one commutes from Berlin to Munich everyday. > and half the country does not live in a city Yes, and that's what I mean by "dumb land-use patterns". That people living in suburbs are not technically within a city's boundaries is a distinction without a difference. Land is wasted to highways and parking lots no one can cross without a two-ton machine, useless lawns no one really has time to enjoy or maintain, dumb McMansions that cost and arm and a leg and so on. And all of that is subsidised in what is effectively a [pyramid scheme]<▶ this video>.