[Roughneck]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Especially when there isn't that requirement for the inner city as well. How long do you think it'll take for the East Village and its maximum 11K residents to pay back the $400M+ in taxpayer money that has already been lavished upon it. Opponents of sprawl complain about the costs of new communities at the edge but are usually silent about the cost of the new community at the core.

11 years? $37M/year in tax last year. But The Bow has been paying out since 2010.
Don't know what residents has to do with the tax revenue. Residents are in the minority of property tax payers. The Downtown Commercial Core only has 8,000 residents and is the biggest tax paying neighborhood the city has. When revenue is driven by property tax, the number of residents only matters in how it drives the value of land and property.

Police and fire needs also scale with population, especially given that their range is less in slower more built-up areas. Which is why there is a greater concentration nearer the core, and incidents requiring police and fire resources are also higher in the core. A new community has much fewer incidents and are almost never need (or get) new fire or police stations, they are serviced by stations in older communities.
Servicing these edge communities with transit is a cost-benefit decision made by the City and potential residents. That analysis means that many of these communities have little to no scheduled transit, and people moving to these communities have decided that they want transit less than they want a newer, cheaper house.

Anything built outside the Ring Road is pretty much automatically hitting the 7+ minute mark necessitating a new station. 'Almost never' has been pretty darn regular recently.

Same goes for schools. Same infrastructure needed as it takes to service the 'higher use' areas. That isn't cost efficient. It's part of the exponential costs of sprawl. And what are these 'many communities' that don't have scheduled transit? Linvingston in it's infancy might not, but Evanston does and it isn't built out, as do Sage Hill and Walden and Simons Valley, etc. The threshold of getting transit as a service is much lower than you're implying.

Cars are so nice that even without focus, except for extremely dense areas, that they will naturally come to dominate modal share as people get rich. Even in Europe, cars have more than 80% modal share of passenger-km, despite older cities, higher densities and much higher taxes.

Passenger-km is an absolute #### metric to compare modes. Particularly ones like cycling and walking, without factoring in the average distance per trip.

For example: 30 new people move to Calgary. 10 move to the Beltline and walk 1km to work. 10 move inner city and bike 5km to work. 10 move to Seton and drive the 30km to work. Cars get over 80% of the new modal share passenger-km, but that isn't an accurate portrayal of how people are choosing their preferred modes of transit. It just means people who drive, travel greater distances. The longest commutes are typically by car, so obviously they'll have the biggest passenger-km mode share.
Basically the tale of Copenhagen. Seen their inner city population increase in size, bike share increasing, but they're all shorter trips than the average car user.

That kind of cost for a car is for a newer higher end vehicle. If people were concerned about the cost, they could easily cut it down by 50% with an older vehicle. And perhaps it wouldn't benefit everybody if the result of only needing one car is Toronto and Vancouver housing costs.

It's not the cost of a newer high end vehicle. Between insurance and gas and basic maintenance the average car cost would be ~$300/month. So a bit less, sure, but that's ignoring the cost of the car itself, depreciation, and the older the car the more likely maintenance costs will be higher (not to mention the likely hood of a high cost fix happening) etc. A $2500/year commuter vehicle seems like the ownership equivalent of 'Airdrie is only 20 minutes from downtown'. I mean I'm sure it's possible and some people can do it in specific circumstances, but it's not something the average person should be budgeting for.