Calgary's Guildebook for New Communities

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Mull

I am a little confused, do these cost vs income from fees include the capital cost of bridges and roads, or only maintenance?

They include both. The City of Calgary's policy is to spend about 50:50 in capital costs on roads vs transit.

Originally Posted by Mull

This is a very odd statement to me to make in this discussion.

More population density means more services, yes, but you use it as it is a shot at the higher density core.

The general underline assumption of density is - less services per person is required, which you don't address at all?

I'm addressing it by showing that assumption is questionable. Policing is the most expensive city service, and there are more incidents per capita in the core than there are at the suburbs. The Beltline has about 25K residents with 7409 incidents as reported by the crime map. Panorama Hills, a mature suburb has about 26K residents but only 1020 incidents. A very new community like Livingstone has 91 incidents.

https://data.calgary.ca/Health-and-S...-Map/n24v-9r86

Transit is the second most expensive city service. For that, the communities that LRT goes through are the most subsidized given their high capital costs. New communities will probably not even get scheduled bus service for many years.

Edit: and nevermind wealth inequality normalizations...

If we're concerned about how much each community costs, then we don't need to do that particular normalization.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by accord1999

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.

This is totally false. Fire resources and EMS are determined by response times. Developers of new communities are always bitching about the required fire response times being too low, forcing stations to be built to service new, sprawling communities. The cul de sac and crescent craze hurt extra because of the lack of access in those communities.

[Boreal]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

I also don't get why people think electric cars have anything to do with self driving. The software that runs a car is completely separate from what energy source propels it.

Its like saying you expect big computing advances as the power grid in Alberta switches from coal to gas - one doesn't affect the other.

Maybe because Tesla is currently a leader in both electrics and self driving?

What is easier to refuel? Electric or combustible fuels?
What has less maintenance? Electric or combustible fuels?
What is safer traveling down the road? A tank full of combustible fuel or a compact battery with chemical used to store electricity entombed within it?

This is nothing like shifting from coal to gas and thinking you can optimize the power grid..

Electric cars recapture energy lost in braking and have the ability to trickle charge in a variety of ways, all of these incorporate various levels of the computational science used in automation in ways that are not possible with combustible fuels.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

This is anecdotal, but my uncle has worked at a car dealership for 30+ years (he's currently the finance manager). According to him, new car sales to adults in their 20s and 30s is way WAY down compared to where it was ~15 years ago. Young people simply aren't buying cars in anywhere close to the same numbers they used to.

Couldn't that just be from the increasing quality of cars, making used cars a better deal for most.

With COVID accelerating the move for white collar professional to work from home full-time, this trend will only increase faster.

American statistics show that driving is back to about 90% of pre-pandemic. What COVID and the work from home trend is devastating is transit, which is down more than 50% in North America.

Urban planners would be wise to take the lifestyle preferences of younger generations into account and start designing communities around active transportation like walking and cycling instead of the old way where the car was assumed to be king.

Walking and cycling accounts for a very small portion of modal share by passenger-km. In much more dense and temperate England, walking and cycling accounts for just 4% of passenger-km. There are a lot of non-commute trips that are only possible or convenient by car.

[Bill Bumface]

Post war urban planning is as piss poor in England as it is here.

What I'd like to see is if people had an option of a walkable community at the same price as an auto oriented community, how does the transport mode distribution change, how does happiness and health look?

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

This is totally false. Fire resources and EMS are determined by response times. Developers of new communities are always bitching about the required fire response times being too low, forcing stations to be built to service new, sprawling communities. The cul de sac and crescent craze hurt extra because of the lack of access in those communities.

Sure, but those new stations are servicing multiple communities. The density of fire stations is higher at the core and less at the edge.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

Post war urban planning is as piss poor as it is here.

What I'd like to see is if people had an option of a walkable community at the same price as an auto oriented community, how does the transport mode distribution change, how does happiness and health look?

I guess the big question whether it's possible for a walkable community to be the same price (for the same housing) as a car oriented community?

As for modal share change, Denmark and Copenhagen is widely considered one of the capitals of cycling in Europe (along with the Netherlands). And Copenhagen has been widely praised for its policies that seem to have greatly increased non-car modal share.

But if one looks at Danish statistics for the entire country, you find that over the last 30 years since cycling statistics started to be available, cycling has actually been slowly declining in Denmark, while private cars have increased. Despite the best efforts of Copenhagen, it doesn't appear that it has converted drivers to cyclists, it may just have redistributed them where cyclists went to live in the central part of cities, drivers went to the suburbs and showing just hard it is to get people out of their cars.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Couldn't that just be from the increasing quality of cars, making used cars a better deal for most.

If that was the case, then new car sales would be down across the board for every demographic group. That's not happening. Boomers are buying new cars just as often as they ever did. It's only among the younger generations that car sales have seen a significant decline (again, this is anecdotal).

Walking and cycling accounts for a very small portion of modal share by passenger-km. In much more dense and temperate England, walking and cycling accounts for just 4% of passenger-km. There are a lot of non-commute trips that are only possible or convenient by car.

All that graph shows is a self-fulfilling prophecy: most people currently live in low-density car-centric communities with few or no amenities within walking distance and thus they are forced to drive more often. What a surprise. What you ought to be looking at is the trending data: given equal cost options, where are young people choosing to live, and what modes of transportation are they desiring? Cars are still the majority, but active modes and higher-density urban communities are trending upward.

[topfiverecords]

Originally Posted by accord1999

...

I'm addressing it by showing that assumption is questionable. Policing is the most expensive city service, and there are more incidents per capita in the core than there are at the suburbs. The Beltline has about 25K residents with 7409 incidents as reported by the crime map. Panorama Hills, a mature suburb has about 26K residents but only 1020 incidents. A very new community like Livingstone has 91 incidents.
...

You can't purely tie crime incidences to population or residency of the region they take place. Let's see a map of where those causing the incidents hold residency. No one goes up to Panorama Hills for a night at the bar, and then gets into altercations or disorderly situations. Perps doing auto break ins probably live in the suburbs. Crime happens where urban action happens. Not at Costco.

Beltline could have zero residents, all the same vibrant activity and crime may not decrease much.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by topfiverecords

You can't purely tie crime incidences to population or residency of the region they take place. Let's see a map of where those causing the incidents hold residency. No one goes up to Panorama Hills for a night at the bar, and then gets into altercations or disorderly situations. Perps doing auto break ins probably live in the suburbs. Crime happens where urban action happens. Not at Costco.

Well, if we can't fairly and accurately assign the costs of major city budget components like policing, how can urbanists fairly claim that new communities or sprawl increases costs and taxes or never pay for themselves?

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by Boreal

What is easier to refuel? Electric or combustible fuels?
What has less maintenance? Electric or combustible fuels?
What is safer traveling down the road? A tank full of combustible fuel or a compact battery with chemical used to store electricity entombed within it?

This is nothing like shifting from coal to gas and thinking you can optimize the power grid..

Electric cars recapture energy lost in braking and have the ability to trickle charge in a variety of ways, all of these incorporate various levels of the computational science used in automation in ways that are not possible with combustible fuels.

Liquid fuels are much faster to refuel. Electricity can be done in your parking stall. But TAAS vehicles would presumably have very high utilization.

Electric has less maintenance. I think safety is probably a wash - fuel tank explosions are not an issue.

Braking recapture is just improved energy efficiency. It doesn't have anything to do with driverless. It will improve the economics of single passenger owned vehicles exactly the same as uber-robotaxi. The computational power used to trickle charge a battery is a miniscule fraction of that needed for full self driving. It doesn't even make a dent, so it isn't relevant.

I think battery electric vehicles will take over, and my next sedan purchase will probably be electric. But if someone actually had self driving technology you could easily put it in an ICE vehicle.

[topfiverecords]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Well, if we can't fairly and accurately assign the costs of major city budget components like policing, how can urbanists fairly claim that new communities or sprawl increases costs and taxes or never pay for themselves?

Nothing will ever be fair. It's easier that way.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Sure, but those new stations are servicing multiple communities. The density of fire stations is higher at the core and less at the edge.

*MAP*

This kind of proves my point. It's expensive as hell to provide fire services, per capita, in the suburbs. You have fire trucks sitting largely idle because of a need to maintain response times.

The stations in the inner city neighbourhoods around downtown may be slightly larger, but it's pretty fair to say the incremental costs are minimal compared to a net-new station.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

If that was the case, then new car sales would be down across the board for every demographic group. That's not happening. Boomers are buying new cars just as often as they ever did. It's only among the younger generations that car sales have seen a significant decline (again, this is anecdotal).

Many of the boomers are now in their prime income earning age (or prime net income after expenses) and probably have benefited from asset appreciation, while millenials are struggling with housing costs. And from US data, up till the pandemic vehicle miles travel did not show any decline.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA

All that graph shows is a self-fulfilling prophecy: most people currently live in low-density car-centric communities with few or no amenities within walking distance and thus they are forced to drive more often. What a surprise. What you ought to be looking at is the trending data: given equal cost options, where are young people choosing to live, and what modes of transportation are they desiring? Cars are still the majority, but active modes and higher-density urban communities are trending upward.

Using the same UK data which has data back to the early 1950s, here's the trend in cycling, buses and trains (in billion passenger-km).



http://maps.dft.gov.uk/tsgb-table-catalogue/ (TSGB0101)

There is a small uptrend for cycling (5.56 billion passenger-km) but it's still a fraction of what it was in the 1950s. And even with significant investment and growth in rail in recent years, total public transit distance traveled is still lower than it was in the early 1950s, even though total ground transportation had grown by over 600 billion passenger-km in that same time period.

[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.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Using the same UK data which has data back to the early 1950s, here's the trend in cycling, buses and trains (in billion passenger-km).

As Roughneck notes in the post above, using person-km as your metric is highly misleading and disingenuous. Of course people who live in low-density suburban communities where literally every single trip requires getting in a car are going to skew the numbers. Let's look at two hypothetical people, Steve Suburb and Ursula Urban. On the same day, they each make the following two trips:

Round-trip commute to work:
Steve: 40km drive
Ursula: 5km bike ride

Round-trip errand (e.g. grocery shopping):
Steve: 8km drive
Ursula: 0.5km walk

If you measure that in terms of person-kms, as you did, the modal breakdown looks like this:

Car: 48km (90%)
Bike: 5km (9%)
Walk: 0.5km (1%)

But if you look at it from the perspective of total trips, which is the metric that actually matters when evaluating what modes people choose, it looks like this:

Car: 50%
Bike: 25%
Walk: 25%

[Boreal]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Well, if we can't fairly and accurately assign the costs of major city budget components like policing, how can urbanists fairly claim that new communities or sprawl increases costs and taxes or never pay for themselves?

So you must be a fan of high taxation and the infrastructure deficit.

https://twitter.com/user/status/904191237518893056

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/pu...d-urban-sprawl

But I’m sure you have some other warped reason why avoiding capital tangible asset management for a 1/2 century isn’t the result of sprawl.

It’s not that hard to conceptualize a basic cost per residential unit for every unit of pipe, wire, and road with respect to taxation, capital costs, maintenance costs, and replacement costs.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27895055?seq=1

You want sprawl.

Pay for it. It’s not that hard.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Roughneck

11 years? $37M/year in tax last year. But The Bow has been paying out since 2010.

Which is outside of the East Village and subsidizing it.

Don't know what residents has to do with the tax revenue.

It goes to the point that why should new communities be expected to almost immediately cover its upfront costs if the East Village definitely does not.

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.

But the faster speed of the roads means that they can cover multiple communities, as seen by the map I posted earlier.

Same goes for schools. Same infrastructure needed as it takes to service the 'higher use' areas.

Schools are ultimately a transfer from households with no school age children to households with school age children. And like fire and police stations, they aren't that quick (especially high schools) to build for new communities. The north-North Central has been waiting for a high school for decades.

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.

All those communities in the NC are close to being built out. The 2019 census showed Evanston with nearly 18K residents, already #9 in population. Combined with the other four Symons Valley communities and there's at least 45K residents. And even then, the transit routes are mainly medium frequency feeder routes to the terminals at North Pointe or Tuscany. Not a big investment compared to new rail.

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

But they are a way to see if there is a conversion away from driving to active transportation methods due to WFH and demographics. We would be seeing +1 km walking or +5 km cycling and -10 km driving, numbers that would add up in the annual total.

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's the most generous interpretation of Danish data that shows per-capita cycling down from 670 km/y in 1990 to 490 km/y in 2019, while private cars are up from 9100 km/y to 10700 km/y.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Boreal

So you must be a fan of high taxation and the infrastructure deficit.

Is there a city anywhere in Canada/US, dense or sprawling, high tax or low tax that doesn't claim to have an infrastructure deficit?

New York City is the biggest city, one of the richest, one of the most dense and it too is falling back in maintaining and replacing its infrastructure.

You want sprawl.

Pay for it. It’s not that hard.

You know what, it would be interesting to see how a completely user pay system would work. I suspect it wouldn't look as good as density advocates think it will.

[Bill Bumface]

This is some warped, lobbyist type thinking and effort level to flood this thread with skewed "facts".

This way of thinking is also crushing low income families. Increased commute times are disproportionately hitting the poor and causing parents to have significantly less time to raise their kids, leading to a nice poverty cycle trap.