Quote:
Originally Posted by Party Elephant
Building sprawl is easier and cheaper, but maintaining it is not. More roads, pipes, sewers spread out over a greater area with a smaller tax base, which I guess is what you were saying with "until the costs start spiraling out of control".
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But roads aren't really that expensive, and water is a utility that is self-funded.
The most expensive services for Calgary is policing , fire and transit; things that scale mainly with population, and police and fire incidents are often concentrated in the central core. And these days there is nothing more expensive for a city to build then rail through a built-up area. Calgary has about $10B allocated in its capital budget and over half of that is just the new Green Line LRT, which offers 0 benefits to suburban commuters in the North and just barely gets far enough in the SE to offer modest benefits..