Quote:
Originally Posted by accord1999
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..
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Do these things actually scale more with population, or with area? Policing I could see primarily scaling based on population, however fire services I would think would be a function of both population and area (given that they have to maintain a certain minimum response time, there likely needs to be a certain density of fire stations no matter how densely populated a particular area is), while it seems pretty obvious that transit scales much better the more dense the area is.