Quote:
Originally Posted by speedog
So what now? One poster debunked some of the conclusions in this thread that adding 10,000 to a community like Bridlewood would result in increased infrastructure in the inner city - the water system is not set up that way.
As for transit or driving, we just can't assume those 10,000 people are all going to or through downtown and I know when we owned a business in Bridlewood that the majority of our customers did not work in the inner city or have to go through the inner city to get to work. Certainly for the school aged kids of those 10,000, they are not going to or through the inner city with maybe just a handful of exceptions.
Sewer - I still find it very difficult to believe that the CoC would take Bridlewood's sewer and pump it all the way downtown and then back to one of the three SE plants - my suspicions are that there some sewer mains that go form those deep SW communities to one of those three plants without going into the inner city.
I am only using Bridlewood as an example to thwart those that say the inner city infrastructure is affected by everything built on the edges - this may be the case for the NW or west side burbs but I would be highly suspicious that a new home in Walden would be getting it's water from a route that goes through the inner city or that's it's sewer would go all the way back into the inner city to go to one of the three sewer plants.
Maybe I'm wrong but I have a difficult time believing that every new home build on the periphery has it's sewer and water going through the inner city.
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The argument was not that all infrastructure goes through the inner city. The argument was a counter to the statement by suburbia that "Yeah - but man a lot of money has been spent upgrading utilities to deal with the shit density".
My point was that upgrading utilities for density makes sense, because overall, higher density requires less infrastructure than lower density, both from a capital and operational perspective. Building density is good from an infrastructure point of view. That is the entire argument for density across the entire world. This isn't unique to Calgary. My point was also that often, but not always, suburban growth not only requires new infrastructure to be built, but also upgrades to downstream infrastructure. This is especially true for sanitary sewer.
You are correct that not all sanitary sewer runs through the inner city. Most of the south is serviced by the Pine Creek treatment plant, so those mains are mostly running through somewhat newer communities or utility rights of way.
The same goes for downstream transportation. But the argument isn't that every single person is travelling through the inner city, or using inner city roads. The point is that more centrally located residential development has less an impact on the transportation system then residential growth on the outskirts. This is because average travel distances are shorter, and transit, walking and cycling usage is higher. I am sure there are people who live in Bridlewood who work in Bridlewood, or people who live in Evanston who work in Evanston, but on the whole, the average distance driven by car to get to work by people in those communities compared to say, Parkdale, is a lot higher.